While in Boston this weekend, since we’d be stopping by the North End (Boston’s Little Italy), I knew I wanted to make a pit stop at Modern Pastry, my favorite Italian bakery in Boston. It was always a competitor of Mike’s, the tourist-overrun bakery that was always extremely disorganized with the most chaotic lines, but I always preferred Modern because their service was fast and friendly, they filled their cannoli to order (preventing a soggy shell), and their tiramisu was probably my favorite version in the world at that point in my life.

Well, it’s been six years since I’ve been to Boston, and I can’t even remember the last time I even visited the North End. Since the last time I visited Modern, they have expanded and renovated; they are not just a little bakery to grab and go, but they have a large cafe-style sit-down area where you can eat your dessert with your coffee at your leisure with table service. They still have the take-out section, but today, it was like nothing I could remember. It was a long and slow-moving line, and it was clear the cashier didn’t give a crap about any of us. She took a long time to fill orders, and she even wandered around the pastry area doing absolutely nothing while the line just got longer and longer. And when the cash register ran out of paper for receipts, she just stood there and pretended to fiddle  with it (without a refill – so convincing that she was actually doing real work!). This is NOT the Modern Pastry I remember.

The cannoli was just as good as I remember, and so was the tiramisu. But this place really sucks now with service that poor. When you stop caring about your customers and start taking them for granted, that’s when you really don’t deserve my business.

Chris decided to book his parents a surprise side trip to Boston for this weekend, so we headed to the airport today. With my executive platinum American Airlines status, I requested that I be added to the upgrade list complimentary and use my 500-mile-upgrade credits to upgrade Chris and his parents. Eight people on this flight were going to get upgraded given the number of empty seats in First Class, and so we essentially bumped four people off the top of the list given my status. I don’t care; how many times has that happened to me?! Too many to count. And it honestly makes me even happier on the inside when I know that I, an Asian American female in her early 30s, is bumping down a bunch of over-privileged and entitled white men.

When we got on, as per usual, there were two other people of color sitting in first class; both were men who were at least middle aged. Everyone else was middle-aged, white, and male. Men always dominate the priority cabins. And as usual, I appear to be the youngest person sitting in the priority cabin, and the only East Asian person. Chris’s mom commented on that, too, after the flight, about the lack of diversity in First Class both in color and in gender. “Privilege” in this country tends to go to white males regardless of what people want to deny about systematic discrimination and discrimination in general. All you have to do is look at things like who’s seated in First Class; who gets pulled over by cops more often, and who gets worse treatment in restaurants than others.

It’s the day after my friend’s wedding, and I’m having my own version of wedding glow. No, I didn’t get married yesterday. No, I didn’t even have sex yesterday. But I had so much fun over the last two days that now I am sad to be leaving sunny Phoenix and my friend’s great friends, warm and hospitable family, and the endless citrus trees that line the streets and homes everywhere in this great metropolis. And I should also mention I’m going back to New York, where a snow storm is on its way this Tuesday. Fun times await.

That’s the other thing about the Phoenix area — these freaking citrus trees are everywhere. In car rides from the airport to downtown, from downtown to Scottsdale and through the residential areas of Phoenix, all I saw were these gorgeous, luscious trees dotted with yellow and orange. FRESH FRUIT TREES. In New York City, I am so enveloped in a concrete jungle that I rarely think about how people living in other parts of the country and world just get inundated with fresh fruit and vegetables on their own property without even trying. As my friend’s grandpa told me, when many people move into their homes in Arizona, their houses come with fresh lemon and orange trees because much of this land was once citrus orchards (the irony considering we are in the middle of a desert out here). And these trees tend to flower and fruit with little to no effort outside of watering; he says in a typical year, his citrus trees are overloaded with fruit from January all the way to nearly September! They try to juice as many of the oranges as possible and freeze the juice for daily consumption, but with just the two of them, they just cannot keep up. They even give them to visiting friends and family, but even after all that, they end up wasting about 70 percent of the fruit. “The trees just don’t stop producing, and we can’t eat and drink them all!”

Well, I would love to have taken home a bag full of fresh, organic citrus if they would offer to give some to me…

The freshest fruit we get is from Fairway or Whole Foods. What a different life. Her dad was so amused at how excited I got about the fresh citrus. Clearly, I’m coming from a very urban area. Now, I can’t even look at the oranges and lemons at the grocery store the same way. This is probably how they feel about bottled orange juice or lemons at the supermarket — not up to their standard of freshness.

In the Wellesley Alum Foodies group on Facebook, a very controversial article was posted, which I will not link here because of how stupid it is: the title of the article was something along the lines of “Butter does not belong in sandwiches, and if you do this, you are wrong.” The person who posted it said she had no idea that people put butter in their sandwiches, which was fine. What was not fine was that the person who wrote the article was so culturally insensitive and clearly from a country where butter was not perceived as “normal” in sandwiches that he proceeded to attack any culture or person who puts butter in his/her sandwiches.

Some people grew up in societies where mayonnaise in sandwiches were abnormal. Others grew up in societies where butter in sandwiches was weird. And of course, there are many people in the world who have grown up in places where sandwiches themselves were not very common foods to eat. This lack of foresight or understanding (or desire to understand) is what ultimately led us to Trump Nation: the inability to conceive of the notion that people who are different than us can actually be good or okay people, and that the lifestyles they lead could be productive or possibly even worth emulating. If you cannot even fathom the idea that entire societies, like that in Switzerland and France, grow up raising children with sandwiches that are smeared with butter, then you must be so ignorant to not accept anything that is not “normal” to just you. Everyone’s version of normal is different.

We just booked flights to Taiwan for this summer, so I’ve been getting excited and researching where we’re going to visit. Even though the island of Taiwan is not very large, there are so many things to do there, and each region of Taiwan has special things it is known for. In China, Shanghai and Beijing are known as the major tourist destinations; but most people don’t know anything about Taiwan outside of its capital of Taipei, if even that. It seems to be under appreciated as a major destination, and it’s obvious when you look at Marriott and IHG hotel offerings to discover that both major hotel chains have only 2-4 hotel locations in Taiwan, and they are all in Taipei. Forget Kaohsiung, the major populated city in the south of the island, or Hualien, the major city/town that is closest to Taroko Gorge, which is considered the number 1 site to visit in all of Taiwan.

I guess that’s like when visitors come to the U.S., and all they think about are New York and LA. It still makes me sad, though.

After clearing immigration and tossing our checked bags to get rechecked on our flight back to New York through LAX, we went through the regular security check line at Tom Bradley International Terminal and passed our carry-on bags through. Much to our annoyance, the tray with all three of our laptops in it got marked for inspection, and we waited over 20 minutes for a TSA rep to do a formal check on our computers. When we asked why there was no one coming to do an inspection, a rude TSA worker said they didn’t have anyone to do it. Chris said to her that we had a flight to catch. She responded back, clearly annoyed, “Everyone here has a flight to catch.” Yet, she stood there the entire time just looking around and not physically doing a single thing. The even more ridiculous part about this was that there were three other TSA reps standing by the body scanners, chatting away and doing little to nothing, plus a random TSA employee standing there and watching the trays pile up at the end of the security line (while there was a shortage of them at the beginning of the line), and the TSA guy who ended up calling out for bag check ended up doing the check on our bags. So he called for someone who never ended up coming, and in the end after over 20 minutes, he decided to do it himself. Wow, what a good idea.

As much as I love Elizabeth Warren, I have to strongly disagree with her when she gets mad that people knock government agencies and say that “nothing in government ever gets done.” When you see incompetence and flat out laziness like what I’ve described above, it’s quite hard to have respect for government workers when they do not value efficiency and actually getting their jobs done (which they are paid very well for). At the end of the day, what is their incentive to work faster with getting travelers through security, anyway? Their wages will be the same, and they’re not incentivized to work faster, be friendly to travelers getting through, or to take on tasks that they may not have gotten officially assigned at the beginning of their shifts. People work based on incentives. If there are no incentives, there’s no reason to do a better job.

Our last day in Thailand included a complete cluster with our in-unit washer at the hotel. We thought it would be a good idea to return home with all clean clothes instead of the massive dirty laundry bag we normally have, especially given we’re coming back from a very humid city, but it resulted in a flooded kitchen and sopping wet clothes. We had to manually wring out all the clothes into the kitchen sink, then dry the clothes in the dryer machine three times before everything was dry enough to pack. Why do washer and dryer units have to have so many complicated settings and then fail? You’d think they would have gotten simpler and more intuitive as time has gone on.

I’m sad to be leaving Thailand, especially all the incredible street food and the array of beautiful colors everywhere, but I think I’m ready to leave. Traveling to cities as crowded and fast-paced as Bangkok is rarely relaxing, even when you are taking breaks for indulgent yet cheap activities such as massage or facials. And with places like Chiangmai, there is so much to do, see, and eat that you feel like you have to see as much as you can in order to make your time traveling there worth it. I’m actually looking forward to relaxing on the couch when we get back to New York, because as Chris says, our vacations are not our relaxing times; that’s what couch time back home is for.