I woke up at 4:15 this morning to catch a 6am flight to Atlanta. I knew it was too early when the little food stands were still not open when I got past security and to my gate. When I arrived at 8:30am, I felt exhausted and like I hadn’t even slept the night. I was lucky to get early check in at my hotel and napped for half an hour before getting back to work before my meetings began in the afternoon.

I can feel myself getting older. I don’t always feel it or think I look it, but when I wake up at 4am these past two Mondays to get on a work flight, I feel miserable afterwards. Even now as I type this, I feel worn. My colleagues and I had an early dinner and got back to our hotel at 8pm, and I went straight back to my computer to get all these things done that I had no time to get done during the day. And two more packed and full days await me. I want to take one long nap.

I dreaded taking this train, and now that I have taken it, it absolutely was not fun at all. It’s a spoiled point of view, but after having taken amazing trains in Japan, Switzerland, and Germany, it’s really hard to take an Amtrak train and think, “wow, this is an awesome experience!” The wi-fi kept coming in and out, the ride was really bumpy, and the seats were sub par. Granted, it only took one hour and 20 minutes to get back to Penn Station, but I could feel myself getting nauseated while trying to get some work done. I just want to get home. I just want to get home. I kept thinking this in my mind.

I talked to my dad about the whole experience, and he said to me that at least I got to stay at a nice hotel in downtown and expense some decent meals. The truth is that while work travel may seem glamorous to those who don’t do it often or at all, at the end of the day, sometimes it’s really nice and comforting just to eat a meal in your own home, made by yourself or a family member, and just sit and relax and not be in some foreign transient environment. It can be a really lonely and alienating experience, especially after you got stranded in an airport due to wind storms and everyone around you is an upset or angry stranger.

After a failed attempt to do a day trip to Guangzhou and deciding to pass on a Macau day trip this time around, we spent our last full day in Hong Kong at Disneyland. The city makes it so easy for you to get there on your own, with an incredibly affordable train trip to get there, its own separate train that even has windows in the shape of Mickey Mouse heads, and clearly marked signs denoted with Mickey heads so that you know exactly where you are going and how to get there. My two favorite rides, Space Mountain and It’s a Small World were there, and much to Chris’s disgust and embarrassment, I made him go on It’s a Small World with me (we were lucky and got to ride Space Mountain twice, along with Grizzly Mountain, a combination of Thunder Mountain the U.S. and another ride I can’t remember). I don’t care what anyone else says about the Small World ride and how “kiddy” it may be. It was my favorite Disneyland ride when I first went to Disneyland Anaheim when I was five, and it will continue to be one of my top two favorite Disney rides. I love that it teaches young children about the world outside of what they know, other cultures, other languages, and other traditions. And I love the cute depictions of people dancing, singing, and living life in their different daily environments. And it’s just such a happy ride. You can’t help but get the song stuck in your head at the end, or at least the tune.

A major difference between this theme park and the Anaheim and Orlando locations I’ve been to, other than the variety of food (who would have ever thought I could get salted egg, bok choy, cha siu, soy sauce chicken over rice with a side of curried fish balls and turnip at a Disneyland?!) and the smaller size (there are rides that are very mindfully overlapping each other), was the difference in the haunted mansion ride. When I was five and sat on this ride, I was immediately spooked that we were all seated in what appeared to be a coffin seat. At the end, I was half scared and half laughing at the image of the fake ghost that appears in the mirrors between me and my ride partner. As soon as we got seated today, I knew the ghost image would not happen; the seats were not high enough for an image to appear that would sit taller than me, and the seat itself was not the coffin shaped seat I remember vividly from Anaheim and Orlando. And lo and behold, it was exactly as I suspected; the end had no ghost appear with us in our seat, no mirrors at all!

The thought that instantly came to me was that because Chinese people are traditionally so superstitious about death, Hong Kong could not handle it if they were seated in a coffin shaped seat, even if it was just for an amusement park ride. They would think it would be bad luck. The same goes for having a ghost image appear next to them in a mirror, as that is what happens on the haunted house ride back in the U.S. References to departed spirits or the afterlife are very bad in Chinese culture, and this appears to be the rationale for having a more “mystical,” fantasy-based theme in the Hong Kong equivalent of the haunted mansion according to all the online sources we read that compare the differences among the Disneyland theme parks across the world.

I guess even at Disneyland, you can’t have fun with death among the Chinese.

The first time I took a real vacation from work for more than one or two days was in November 2009, when I went to Chicago for a long five-day-weekend with two girlfriends to celebrate Thanksgiving. My then-boss asked me what I was planning to do in Chicago, and I said one of the activities I was most looking forward to was visiting the famous Art Institute. He was eleven years older than me, a very jaded and cynical native Brooklynite who thought and cared little of the world outside of New York City. “Why do you have to go there to see the paintings?” he asked me as he rolled his eyes. “You can just Google Image it.” He half meant it as a joke to tease me, but I know he half meant it, as well.

Yes, I can Google Image it. He can, too. But I don’t think that’s enough, especially with things with such immensity as the Tian Ta Buddha in Hong Kong. We took the Ngong Ping cable car trip to the area of the famous big Buddha, and when we arrived and walked all the way up those grueling stairs, even with my ribs aching from my lingering whooping cough effects, I really felt in awe. Like many sites, the photos on Google or anywhere on the web do this place no justice. The Buddha was far bigger than I even imagined it to be, and it looked so regal and grand sitting atop its own hill in the midst of the endless Hong Kong greenery that caught me off guard. And I never thought much of any Buddha’s facial expression until I looked at this one’s — he actually seems extremely content, like he’s at peace with the world despite all the insane events that continue to happen. At least one of us has genuine hope for the future.

I haven’t talked to my parents over the phone in over a week. It’s mainly because I was scared for them to hear my voice; this is the worst I’ve ever heard my own voice, and it often hurt just to speak given how heavily coated with phlegm my vocal chords were. I didn’t want to scare them into thinking I was dying, so I just emailed my dad to let him know I was a bit under the weather and would call when I felt better and could speak. I guess this didn’t go over so well with my mom, who freaked out and thought I was dying. I eventually revealed to them that I contracted whooping cough, so of course, dad printed out Web MD articles about the most extreme cases of whooping cough, where people have broken ribs, gotten brain damage, and had to suffer from extremely violent coughing for over 100 days, and I’m sure this added to my mom’s paranoia. The important thing, I thought, was that I caught it before the 3-week mark (that’s when my doctor said you would be doomed to violent coughing for three months because it would have reached maturity in your body and at that point be indestructible), so my antibiotics would work and help cure me by Christmas day. I thought they would be happy about this, but my mom freaked out even more.

“I know who is responsible for you getting this, but I’m not going to say,” she said in her accusing tone. That’s her nice way of saying she blames Chris. “You traveled and got this in that country.” No, not really. It’s not Australia’s fault. Everyone’s immunized from it here. Colds in New York don’t just magically become whooping cough in the Southern Hemisphere. I picked it up in New York. She wouldn’t hear it, though, and insisted she was right and “has wisdom,” and that she didn’t want to hear my lies and excuses. “And why didn’t he bother calling me when he knew you were sick and I was worrying? There’s absolutely no respect here.”

You can never really win with irrationality and paranoia.