Thursday, January 28, 2016

Vietnamese Ground Services

On Saturday morning, January 23, 2016, I woke up staring at a white plaster ceiling that I could nearly touch. Momentarily confused, I realized that I was on the top bunk of my hostel in Hue, central Vietnam. I'd slept clutching my water bottle. The previous night was spent entirely with western backpackers, devolving from trivia night into shots night into dance night, and I immediately downed the rest of my water bottle.

Heavy drizzle created a miserable morning mood at the hostel. Guests who just eight hours earlier had been joyously conversing with strangers had reverted to the groups they had arrived in. I followed suit, eating the complimentary pancakes alone. Hue has a lot to offer, including an Imperial City, many impressive tombs, and a cool bridge but I had seen none of those yesterday, opting instead to fulfill my social wants. Today obligatorily, I tightened my raincoat and headed out to the Imperial City.

The Imperial City is heavily influenced by the Forbidden City and actually quite impressive despite taking wartime damage. But this post isn't about centuries-old palaces - it's about something much more epic.

My friend O'Neal Qin works for Cathay Pacific, and after 2 years in Hong Kong they put him in charge of their Vietnam team and sent him to Hanoi. I met up with him in Hanoi and he told me that he'd be in Da Nang that weekend for a team event. His team there drank a lot - would I care to join? I was going to be in the vicinity then, so I decided why not, I'd join. In fact, I'd flown into Da Nang before spending 2+ hours on a sleeper bus to Hue. After returning from my rainy sojourn to the Imperial City, I was pretty to keen to escape and return to Da Nang. The hostel staff informed me that public buses left every hour and called me a taxi to the station.

Immediately upon alighting from the taxi, I was harassed by motorbike drivers. It seems that a significant portion of the Vietnamese economy is just offering people rides on their motorbikes, clearly without any sort of license required. The near constant unsolicited drive-bys yelling "Taxi?" are probably as close as a male can get to experiencing catcalling. In this occasion, I was particularly pissed, because it was raining and I was literally just dropped off from a taxi at my destination. No one in the bus station speaks any English, but after sufficient grunting I get on a rusty minibus to Da Nang. The bus is nothing like the double deck sleeper bus I had arrived on, but there are only 2 passengers on board, so I take my two huge bags and hop on. I put my bags next to me and occupy two seats. The bus sits there for another 15 minutes and slowly fills up and I start to feel guilty for occupying two seats - still there's some empty seats. Then these seats vanish, and an employee roughly comes over and takes my bigger bag away. Half my worldly possessions are inside, so I watch it with concern, but apparently there is a trunk to this thing. I put the other bag on top of my lap and another woman with a facemask and a bamboo hat gets on next to me, then 3 people squish into the seats behind me, and the bus takes off.

But it stops almost right away. Periodically along the path, people on the roadside just keep getting on and suddenly there are stools down the aisle of the bus with people sitting uncomfortably on them. My position is so cramped that it literally takes me a full minute of shifting around and zigzagging my arm to reach my phone in my left pocket. This is unbelievably less comfortable than the previous bus ride which had reclining beds and wifi, and only $1 cheaper. I'm digging the experience though - this is how a lot of Vietnamese people get around. At one point one of the people in the chicken coop that is the backseat is the first to disembark, and he literally climbs over every man woman and child in the minibus aisle.

When the bus finally gets to the Da Nang bus station, it takes me about 3 minutes to get out because I have to wait for blood to circulate to my legs. I get pestered by motorbike taxi people again. One guy follows me for 200m, at which point I went on a 30 second rant to him in Cantonese, after which he meekly replies, "Moto bike?" I eventually do grab a taxi, but get held up by an old man chatting to my driver for several minutes. Then inexplicably the old man gets into the taxi with me. I'm astounded - how rude? I try my best not to get offended - if the driver goes straight to my stop first, what difference does it make?

Next thing I know the a valet opens my door and picks up my bags. I bemusedly step into the 4 star hotel and am offered a complimentary glass of fruit juice. It's the first time I've encountered good service in Vietnam and the contrast to the minibus, the motorbike harassment and the impromptu car pool ride could not be more stark. O'Neal arrives a few minutes later - Cathay is putting him up in the hotel - and he takes me into a room larger than the one I stayed in the previous night, but with one more fridge and eight fewer people. O'Neal informs me that the event tonight is actually a gala which Cathay is just a participant, and that it's fairly casual. I ask him, "Are you sure it's ok if I go?" and he reassures me it's ok. The party starts at 5:30.

I only have a short sleeve collar shirt, but I throw a sweater over it and you can't tell. With jeans and sneakers, this is literally the most formal my backpacker self can get. The banquet hall is called "For You Palace" (don't ask), and we're early. There's apparently no assigned seating so we have our pick of tables, each of which are adorned with a bottle of Macallan's. Everyone seems to know O'Neal and treat him with pleasantries, and are confused when I am introduced as "just a friend." When O'Neal leaves for a minute to attend to some business, a woman who seems to be running things approaches me. "Do you work for Cathay or DragonAir?" she asks me. "No," I answer honestly. "I'm just O'Neal's friend traveling through Da Nang." "So you don't have connection to aviation industry." "Uh, no," "Hmph." She hovers next to me awkwardly for a few judgey moments, possibly my most uncomfortable moments of a long day full of them.

Despite a lack of connection to Vietnam aviation, I see a dozen business cards before I see any food. The event is sponsored by the Saigon Ground Services (SAGS), and I now know their CEO's email address. While I am in fact looking for a job, I don't try very hard to network this night. Da Nang is a city of 1 million, and Cathay have just four staff members permanently here. At some point, O'Neal says I should pretend to work for Cathay. "You can be a Hong Kong based Strategy Director." I'm glad for the instant promotion and start practicing for my role before I realize I've actually worked in Aviation before - with the Airport Authority Hong Kong as a consultant designing a runway expansion.  I quickly jump to the client side and rebrand myself as an AAHK Project Manager.

The whole event feels very much like a Hong Kong wedding, and so there's a lot of ceremony before we get to the food. For this gala, the show includes a song and dance number with about a dozen performers. By now there's over 150 of us but it feels like a bit of an overkill - this ain't the Academy Awards. After the applause, two Emcees come onstage, one speaking Vietnamese, the other speaking halting English. I'm surprised the event is even bilingual - O'Neal and I are almost certainly the only non-Vietnamese here. At some point we hear the name "O'Neal" called and his Vietnamese coworkers tell him in slight horror that he's supposed to go onstage now. We knew it was in the program that he would present some gifts to the best performers of the year, but apparently it wasn't supposed to be this early. O'Neal rides with it though and I'm greeted with the surreal sight of seeing my friend give a speech and then presenting gifts that are teddy bears to excited staff members. And the evening had just begun.

As I mentioned, every table had a bottle of Macallan's. Other tables were coming over cheers-ing us, aggressively forcing us to all down whiskey. I do a shot with the CEO of SAGS and try to keep track of how many drinks in I am. 3...4...5... now it's our turn to do the rounds and we stroll across the room. "Who are you!?" "Hi I'm Cal, I'm from Hong Kong Airport!" "Cool! Mot Hai Ba Yo!!" The last phrase means "1, 2, 3, Cheers" and while I may forget most of the Vietnamese words I learn on this trip, I think that phrase will stick. The meal gets more interesting because between every course, there is another dance and song performance. I return to my seat about 6 drinks deep to watch a male singer crooning in Vietnamese. O'Neal leans towards me and remarks, "It's only 7 o'clock."  I marvel at the chain of events that led to my semi-inebriated state at a Vietnamese Aviation Annual Gala. I'm not sure what was more amazing: that 4 hours before, I'd been cramped into the side of a minibus, that 20 hours before I'd been in a hostel with 40 backpackers, that 3 weeks before I'd been at a desk job in Hong Kong, that 6 years before I'd been in an American university.

The next couple hours get pretty hazy. I give a blurred glance around the room - I don't think anyone else on my minibus is here. I see a girl who reminds me of my ex, and it dawns on me that I once dated a Vietnamese woman. Could this have been my life? Someone asks me about my job and I tell him that I'm working on the Third Runway Expansion, but his English is terrible and he just pats me on the back and moves on. I meet a cute girl who tells me her name is "Mya" not "Mia." Suddenly I'm dragged onstage and I'm dancing among a huge crowd. A guy in ripped jeans goes to the edge of the stage and proceeds to do a backflip off of it. I back away from the edge just in case anyone pressures me to attempt a backflip. A bathroom stop reveals a bent over man puking into a urinal, with a For You Palace staff member patting him on the back and holding his head up. When we head out around 9:20pm, Jai Ho from Slumdog Millionaire comes on and I sneak a peak back at the stage, now a crazy Indo-Viet dance floor underneath corporate sponsorship banners. If there are delays at Da Nang airport tomorrow, you know why.

The rest of the night included a club with similar dimensions to a football pitch, and a smaller karaoke club, because of course it did. I woke up the next morning in a 4 star hotel clutching my water bottle with a bunch of business cards in my back pocket.

Wednesday, January 27, 2016

Get Out There

A lot of people never travel. Maybe around 64% of Americans never leave the country, and given that many people in less developed countries can never afford to travel, I'd guess that between 70-80% of the world spend their entire lives in one country. Among those who can afford to travel, a lot either don't or stick to the same familiar safe spots.

One of my main goals on this trip is to figure out how to reach tentative travelers or non-travelers. I've seen a lot of manifestations of this mentality now. There are the Americans who don't think about leaving home, there are the Europeans who are so focused on how much there is on their continent, and there are Hong Kongers whose trips rotate around the same familiar comfort spots among Taiwan, Singapore and Japan. This last demographic is one I've long struggled to reach. When I told coworkers of my plans in Southeast Asia, they thought I had made a bizarre choice. One coworker legitimately asked if I was going to Vietnam to do opium. I asked him what he likes to see when he traveled, and he said he likes scenery. So I Google image searched "Sapa", my first stop, and beautiful mountain rice terraces came up. He merely shrugged. "You can see those in China."

I think I did a better job expressing myself the day before I left. I was having lunch with a thoughtful local developer, and he asked me why I would start in Vietnam of all places. "Hong Kong people would normally go to places like Japan or Singapore or Western Europe where it's clean and nice." I paused for a moment and said, "It's the exact opposite for me. I come from a clean and nice country country. I know what that's like. What I don't know is what it's like growing up in a developing country. These places have seemed off limits to me, growing up millions of miles away. But they're not actually off limits for me, I just need to make the effort. But for most people who grow up there, coming to a developed country is what's off limits. So I'm lucky, I'm in a position to travel, to see very different lives and share as much as I can about my life." And the developer nodded, and said something to the effect of, "I still won't go, but I'm glad you are. If I ever go to Vietnam I'd go on a tour."

Fair enough, everyone has their limits. But as I travel I try to practice my personal travel philosophy that I've developed over the years. Perhaps the first commandment in this philosophy is, "Thou shall not join guided tours." Now I'm not talking about getting a tour guide to explain what the significance of this castle is - oftentimes you need that knowledge to make the stone walls meaningful. I'm talking about the tour company trips that pick you up on arrival and shepherd you around from site to sight on a bus. I've joined these before with large families and I understand the demand. If you can pay to remove stress from your life, why wouldn't you?

But for my travels this is unacceptable. It's not just that it's cheaper to go on your own. Behind a tour guide dictating where you have to go, you can't actually discover a country's real character or offerings. You only discover what your tour guide lets you discover, and you have no idea what that might entail. Is this really a market where locals buy their groceries? Is this really a traditional alpaca farm or is it a modern zoo for tourists? Shedding that oversight and navigating the streets on your own gives you so much more understanding of how life actually works where you're visiting, even if you need to supply your own narration. 

What's even more crucial, hiding behind a guided tour reduces the local's exposure of you. A tour contains very few organic encounters where you and a local can see each other as individuals instead of a part of an incomprehensible foreign blob. I think this impacts national reputations. So many Chinese, as well as many other East Asians (and Europeans to a lesser extent), travel by tour and this is what locals will see of them. It doesn't do much for your standing abroad when all anyone knows of your country is a bus full of your people ignoring local customs and obnoxiously reducing the surroundings as lifeless photo opportunities. It's very different than seeing one couple walking into your restaurant, struggling to order off your menu and having a nice laughable lost-in-translation exchange in the process. The former builds resentment and the second raises curiosity. In my opinion, the travel habits of Chinese have done much harm to China's international reputation.

I'm also looking to find the balance between "getting off the beaten path" and "seeing the must sees." Really these are overused buzzwords. Perhaps I can phrase it as a balance between reaching the celebrated beautiful wonders of this world and uncovering the beautiful within the mundane. In this specific case, how can I spend so long in Vietnam and not go to Halong Bay? There's nothing wrong with venturing to one of the most beautiful places on the planet - even if it's overrun with tourists. One just has to be wary that the cruise trip teaches one little about the Vietnamese way of life. Such tours can be supplemented by spending some time in average towns and smaller cities, the flip side being that a lot of that time spent can be very boring. The places where regular people live and work are generally pretty mundane and get old fast. It's a tough balance to strike, an experience that is organic and not packaged and also riveting.

Other commandments are more like guidelines. Support the local economy, eat the regional cuisine, learn some of the local language, walk around as much as possible, smile as much as possible. Be flexible - a lot of the greatest travel tips will come from the people you meet along the journey. And don't buy too much cheap crap - those sort of souvenirs don't last (lesson learned the hard way).

Thus far I've had a fairly fly by the seat of my pants trip. I got off the airport in Hanoi needing to take a bus into town and catching a sleeper train to Sapa. I asked a Canadian couple for directions and ended up sharing a hired car with them. I was greatly embarrassed to find out at the end that they had already paid for the ride, and proceeded to buy them 6 beers and apologize in a most Canadian manner.

I've yet to book my lodging more than a day in advance. Twice I've just shown up and asked for a room. I've depended on the kindness of strangers and friends several times. Barely two weeks ago I was engaged in a life of routine and tasks and now I am comfortably removed from such restrictions. There have been many situations where I'd pause and chuckle at the absurdity of it all. There's been a moment where I thought I had seriously screwed up, and a day that started poorly but turned out impossibly well. And I've been brought to tears by separation anxiety in one of the filthiest places I'd ever been. Stay tuned for these stories.

Thursday, January 14, 2016

舊的不去新的不來


I am cleaning out my guest room in anticipation of the beginning of my travels tomorrow.  I am sure that tomorrow my mindset will be one of wonder and anticipation, but tonight it is one of nostalgia and reminiscence. I pull out this poster board with photos. I assembled it as I began my senior year of college in 2009, one of the first times in my life I had this many photos that made me happy. The frame has been damaged since before I came to Hong Kong, but amazingly it has survived all these moves. Now has come the time to dissemble it. I scratch off the scotch tape with my fingernails, peeling off patterns that the same fingers had laid down so many years ago. The tape has aged so much while it hung on my walls, nearly degrading into a mass of resin. Oblivious was I to this process while I passed times of laughter, sorrow, suffering, joy, hate and love. I see pictures of friends I still cherish, and some I no longer do. I see a version of me who has no idea how much is going to happen over the next 6 years.

Tomorrow in a different place this all will seem far away. I know because I've been there before. It was a shock even after a week and a half in Burma, returning to the hustle and bustle of Hong Kong as if no one else had just experienced a slow reflective life off the grid in a developing country. I know I'm going to get on the ground in Sapa and regret just how fast my life was in Hong Kong. I know that the traveling me will enjoy so many hours of the day and have some chill advice, but the working me would slap that advice around with a disparaging self-righteous look of someone suffering to make money. The working me will want to remind the traveling me that ideals rarely apply to reality here somewhere in the middle, I'm guessing one needs a bit of both in life - the busy times to push forward on one's priorities, and the slower times for one to rejuvenate all areas that weren't prioritized. 

Hong Kong truly was packed. There were times in my life where I felt bored enough to create a "Things to do While Bored" list, times where I wanted to go out but couldn't. That wasn't ever a problem in Hong Kong. My life instead was filled with books I never got around to reading, spices I never got around to cooking with, letters I never got around to writing. And I'm not particularly upset by them. The last four years were spent without a television, without a Netflix account and without any computer games. In one sense I did far less time wasting than I normally would.

Tuesday, January 12, 2016

Exploring a Better World

Friday January 8, 2016 was my last day as a working employee at Ove Arup and Partners HK Ltd. This was my first full time big boy job. It was my first job where I went to client meetings, where I went to multiple offices in different cities, where I got a business card. And it's the first time I've ever resigned, which was a surprisingly difficult process to complete. When I look back on my projects, I do find a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction. In the environment of a major international engineering juggernaut, I managed to work on the M+ Museum for Visual Culture, the conceptual planning for the Hong Kong Airport 3rd Runway Expansion, building physics analysis on Icon Siam (luxury mall in Bangkok), and doing stats and regressions for the HKGBC Benchmarking and Energy Saving Tool. While my role on these massive projects were relatively minor, those were four very cool projects with such large scope makes them interesting to talk about. Still, while this retrospection can conjure up feelings of satisfaction and enjoyment, most of my time at Arup was very difficult to endure.
M+ Museum for Visual Culture

Pretty quickly it was clear to me that this was not an ideal job for me.  Obviously I had not studied engineering. This presented both a knowledge gap and a mindset disparity.  Despite their left-brain link, a mathematician is more interested in the thought process and proof of a theorem, whereas an engineer is interested solely in the answer. To a humanities outsider, these differences may appear insignificant, but to me immersed in engineering territory, I felt radically different. In addition to what I lacked, whole skillsets I did possess were marginally used. My background is not just in mathematics and statistics - I graduated from a liberal arts university and took full advantage of its offerings. While I do not expect every little course I study to advance one's career, it pained me that my writing ability, interest in politics and policy, and travel experience were essentially irrelevant to my job performance. I barely even scratched the surface of all the statistical modeling I had studied.

Cultural barriers were ubiquitous throughout my time at Arup. The engineering/liberal arts difference is itself a cultural barrier, but my western education and upbringing often posed difficult for my local coworkers to reconcile.

I leave with a completely transformed mindset. Somewhere along the way I learned to be professional, responding to emails timely and treating clients and contractors with respect. I can see the way I used to write emails and handle simple affairs, and it's a world away from what I do now. 

I've now left to embark on my own. I'll be able to accomplish a dream I've always had of doing work in a foreign coffee shop, starting in Vietnam, one of the best coffee nations this world offers.  I have plenty of worries. I've always had ADD so focus has always been a problem. Even right now as I write this post, I am multi-tasking with an email announcing the HKUPA Annual General Meeting in draft and an MBA essay by Janice in track changes. I know I'll have to be extremely disciplined and set achievable goals along the way.

I had always wanted to create my own career path, and certainly studying statistics then working at an engineering company in a foreign country is an unusual path. I knew there was so much I needed to learn, and these past four years have not disappointed. But now it's time to take what I've learned and apply them in the direction I want to, and prove to myself that I am capable and can create something original.

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Travels Visualized

If you've read my post on my Data visualization of Facebook data, you may have learned that I have this odd hobby of playing with personal data. However you are unlikely to know that I have kept a spreadsheet of where I have spent every night since 2008. But it's true, and it hasn't even been remotely onerous. I have noted the date in which i entered a city and the date in which I left. I've kept the detail mainly to the city level, so there is no record of meanderings throughout urban bedrooms, if that had theoretically happened. There is no record of day trip cities I've visited without spending the night, so sorry Nara, Krebs and Brookline. I also did not stress about whether I reached a city before or after midnight - with the exception of red eye flights, if I flew from Hong Kong on a Friday night and reached my room in Taipei 2am Saturday morning, I recorded myself as spending Friday night in Taipei.

I started this list in the margins of my notebook in a Geography lecture in University College Dublin in the fall of 2008, mainly because I was bored in class. It was far more interesting for me to think about the places I'd traveled to in that very epic year of 2008. Through memory I filled in most of the dates, and eventually I went through my gmail archives and filled in my whole year. It would not be possible for me to fill in 2007 and before because of lack of memory and records. But starting from that fall, I created a spreadsheet and it has survived 4 computers and is now safely on the cloud. I started this blog in 2008 and I feel that I became a very different person starting from that year so I find this data very fitting.

For me, trawling back through this data just brings me pure joy. I had not planned on ever analyzing the data as I am doing now - just scrolling through it had been enough. I'm not sure if anyone else would enjoy it so much going through their own life, and they certainly wouldn't find it so interesting going over mine. But these data visualizations directly take me back to trips I had forgotten.
In terms of the visualization nitty gritty, I had a lot of cleaning up to do. I hadn't even heard of R when I began these records, so I didn't really have a thought to how I should format the data or the scheme of the database in technical speak.
Once I fixed name inconsistencies and date formatting, I decided to focus on the chronological part of my data first. I found the ten cities I'd spent the most time in, then realized many cities were tied and expanded the list to top 15. Without worrying about a y-axis at all, I plotted the dates I'd been in these cities and assigned a nice color palette to them.
And immediately I was pleased. As familiar with my own life story as I am, I could see a lot of stories in those dots. I was at first surprised to see what cities made it. Civate and Osaka are on there on the strength of one trip each, which were both for World's ultimate tournaments. Ultimate tournament trips to Manila are also clearly regular, spaced out evenly starting in 2012. My move from DC, where trips to New York and Newton (my hometown outside Boston) to Hong Kong in late 2011 is also quite obvious. My lengthier stays in Dublin and Beijing which are well-documented in this blog are also visible. Irregular trips to Shanghai, Taipei, Shenzhen and Bangkok pop up. Lastly, I may never spend another night in Newton after we sold our family home, and instead nights in the city of Boston show up instead.

These cities appear low to high in order of appearance (starting from 2008), which is really quite arbitrary. I played around with making the order completely random. I actually liked that better, because in the original version, all the long stays are at the bottom and the top seems very bare, giving the image a sense of imbalance.  My friend points out that at this point I enter data art, because the randomization serves no functional purpose. Here is that graph with even more cities.

Now this has more little stories and might be too cluttered. I don't think I could possibly fit all of my stops in there. Because I go back to places multiple times, I don't know how to provide a sense of chronological order to the cities. There isn't a sense in either graph really of many sequential trips.

Skipping this thought, I considered graphing the latitudes on the y-axis. As the data points were all geographic this was the logical next step. If you didn't recognize the names of these cities, the graph loses a lot of meaning. However, adding longitude and latitude coordinates was tricky. I hadn't been inputting that data in along the way, but the Maps package in R comes with a nice database of world cities. The database comes with population and coordinate information for just about every city of more than 40,000 people in the world (as of 2006). However the naming of some of the cities is bizarre, full of colonial-era names (Rangoon, Bombay), out-of-vogue spelling choices (Cracow, Soul), and a full pinyin rendering of Macau and Hong Kong, with Hong Kong being split into the Sai Kung, Kowloon and Hong Kong Island (xigong, jiulong and xianggangdao). Some of my travels had taken me to places of less than 40,000 people. For the names that didn't match, I didn't know of any better solution that editing all the names individually. If there is a more common sense laden database out there, please let me know. For the cities not on the database, I googled their coordinates. I'm not quite a good enough programmer to build a scraper to do this automatically, but I aspire to get to that level soon. Here's the same graph re-run with latitudes on the y-axis. I added in the names by hand where I saw fit, otherwise they'd bleed over each other.
This graph doesn't do much for me. It's very cluttered and it's hard to organize time and space coordinates together in my mind. The points give the illusion of coordinates, but they're not, they're only one dimensionally coordinates. It is interesting to see that so many of the places I've been are on the same latitude (Beijing is nearly the same as New York), and places that actually are near each other (Hong Kong and Shenzhen, Newton and Boston) now appear so on the map. And it's also cool to see that these cities range as south Bangkok to as north as Dublin, a thought I'd never made on my own. Still, I think there is limited use to this visualization attempt.

Well with all the coordinates in hand, it was time to put them on a real map. I've learned that with maps it's easy to control the size and color overlaid points. R has some in-built plotting functions, which I'd been using for 5 years, and they're pretty great. But people serious about data visualization seem to use a lot of ggplot2 and ggmap, packages developed by the Kiwi statistician Hadley Wickham, who should probably be knighted. I decided it was high time to learn some ggmap. Here's my first attempt:

This map visualization is much more of a classic representation and was equally delightful to me. I particularly liked the lack of borders in this version. It requires more deductive efforts in identifying all the points. I decided to color the points by the year that I first visited that point. Blue represents 2008 and takes up a lot of real estate. The size was set to the number of days I spent in each city. Note that the sizes are not scaled linearly, and in fact I haven't figured out how to control this properly. I actually am rather alright with the outcome though, otherwise Hong Kong and Washington, DC would drown out other cities. I could see more stories here, such as two separate trips to Europe. I could see the "outlier" travels of 2010 that took me to India and Peru. I saw two points from 2008 in western US and was confused as to what they might represent until I remembered I went to Las Vegas and Los Angeles many months apart that year. This truly shows the power of visualization, the ability to convey so much more in so little space. I could also see a bug in my data in this black dot in western America. Investigating further, I'd inputted the coordinates for Littleton, Colorado instead of Littleton, New Hampshire by mistake. Some of the years were also incorrect.

My second go at the map fixed these bugs and added borders just for kicks. I don't really like these large borders, which seem to drown out and minimize my destinations. But for the most part, I was very happy with this map. All I needed was a legend. Turns out this was way harder than I realized, because I had been using ggmap incorrectly this whole time. Hours of debugging later, I finally converted my years into factors and got this to popup.

As a conclusion, these Travels of Cal are about to get a lot more interesting. After 4 years and 3 months at Arup in Hong Kong, my last day will be January 8, 2016. I will be adding some data points in Southeast Asia and building on these visualizations. There's a greater purpose here than documenting my own life, rest assured.