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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dreams of Another Year

This past year I had the good fortune to share housing with Francis Phuang from Singapore. Among the many cross cultural lessons we shared, I saw this music video/short film for the song "Ordinary" which was an official song of the 2015 Southeast Asian Games.  Ordinary It's a long 12 minutes, but the video is inspiring. It tells the story of Fandi Ahmad, the best footballer in Singaporean history, which was also the inspiration for the song.  The song starts "When I was just a little boy from a little town / I made a wish that someday I could turn this around / I made believe that I was right on top of the world." And even though it is a story of a person whose circumstances have very little in common with mine, I can very much relate to it. There is that primordial draw of sport, those dreams of a powerless child to become a powerful player that drive relentless training and so often are prerequisites of success. There are the pains of defeat and rejection which make the hard work and successes so rewarding. These raw emotions transcend generations and continents, so that a kid from suburban Massachusetts in the 1990s can identify with a kid in the early days of independent Singapore.

I've written in my blog about how I relate to Singapore and Malaysia in a way. Well when I visit, the differences in flora and fauna strike me, and I am hyperaware of the accents and ethnicities and cuisine. But the presence of such a large Chinese diaspora grounded me in the mere fate that placed me in America and someone else in Malaysia, and the vast implications that follow. Sure I could have been placed in a rural town in Uttar Pradesh, or among a tribe in the Amazon rainforest, but those experiences are so hard for me to imagine that it doesn't resonate with me to the same degree.

In addition, I've written in my blog about my experience with ultimate, and the joy I found in college after recreationally pursuing it in high school. I want to take this post to further elaborate. I'd love to wax poetically about how the disc has always floated with me, ever since my brother went to CTY summer camp and came back wanting to toss. I was 12 or 13. Minutes after he taught me the forehand grip, I could flick it. I can still remember the shock at seeing the disc leave my fingers after such an unnatural motion - I felt like Harry must have after he waved his phoenix core wand and sparks flew out.

I did not grow up to defeat the most evil ultimate player of all time, but I did throw a lot more flicks. My own summer camp introduced me to my first organized ultimate experience and I quickly became obsessed. Once summer was over though, I lost all access to ultimate. High school ultimate was very much in developmental stages, and my tiny high school will possibly never have an official team. Our school would organize a sport day in May (creatively called May Day) where we'd play games like Capture the Flag, Dodgeball and yes, ultimate. It's amazing how much I'd look forward to that day every year. I did eventually play organized ultimate in high school, and had some fond memories from that experience, but I also had a ton of frustrating moments trying to form a team, failing to transfer my passion for the sport to fellow students. Even after joining ultimate leagues around Boston, my ultimate experience consisted of playing with makeshift uniforms in random unkempt grassy fields. Spectators were a dream - my parents never even saw me play. Ultimate was a hobby that I would pursue passionately almost in secret. The effort I gave to it was almost embarrassing to me, with a massive imbalance between my personal regard for the sport and society's respect for it.

Flash forward to November 2015. Hong Kong is hosting the Asia Oceanic Ultimate Championships. An infrastructure has sprung up around ultimate. Professional leagues are selling tickets in the US and Canada, websites are formed to cover ultimate news, ESPN is showing layouts in their daily Top 10 Plays, and ultimate is officially recognized by the International Olympic Committee. And there I am on the field of Mong Kok Stadium, which only a few weeks before had been sold out hosting a World Cup Qualifying Match. Yes, that World Cup. I'm under the field lights wearing a finely made jersey that says Hong Kong - I'm representing Hong Kong. I'm shaking hands with some of the best players in Australia, Japan and the Philippines - some of the best players in the world - and they're thanking me. There are professional photographers capturing the moments. There's a banner with our neon design displaying boldly WFDF 2015 Asia Oceanic Ultimate Championships Hong Kong. There are TV cameras setup through the stadium livestreaming the event - and there is my voice on the telecast, commentating on the highest level game ever played in Hong Kong. Throngs of players wearing jerseys of every color are milling about exuding joy. They've come from places like New Zealand, India, United Arab Emirates, just to play this game chasing a circular piece of plastic. This game that I once played only on May Day. If my 17 year old self could see this scene, his mind would be insanely blown.

I made that scene above very personal, but I only had a small role in the event. Many long hours were spent by my friends coordinating with the government, designing memorabilia, and setting up endless logistics. I felt guilty somewhat experiencing so much joy on the backs of their hard work. But I did put in my effort as well - and never have I felt so much reward from my hard work. From coordinating nearly 100 volunteers, to running sprint workouts after months of rehabbing from ankle tendinitis, I took AOUC very seriously. And when I walked onto the field after it was done, I felt like Fandi Ahmad, like I was right on top of the world.

Personal Data Science

When I graduated with a Master's in Statistics in the summer of 2011, I had never heard of the term data science. And most of the world hadn't really either, it only picked up as a term really in the year following. Now I can no longer just say that sort of sentence. I have to show some data 

In these intervening years, I've been working in an engineering firm learning a lot about how buildings work, what sort of mechanical systems use power, how to pick a piece of glass with the right reflectivity, light and heat tranmissivity, how to model wind flow and all sorts of applied knowledge I never conceived of as a student. But I haven't been getting in on this data science action in my day job. 

But I did study statistics and I like to play with data. While trying to turn my academic knowledge into something with real world applicability, I've realized how off-base a lot of my education was. Let's start with undergraduate, where I took courses such as Abstract Algebra, Galois Theory, and Complex Analysis. I haven't even come close to using anything there at all. Even with multivariable calculus, one of the foundations of a math major, I can't remember Green's theorem and don't particularly care to. The statistics portion of our learning was thus certainly more applied. The regression course I took junior year has proved invaluable, and learning to code and model in graduate school has been great. The most valuable lesson I probably learned was to not overfit the data when modelling, to make sure your fundament processes are right rather than your results. However the fundamental processes of graduate statistics are flawed in this modern world - courses teach more like history courses. Painstaking attention is made to how a theorem was discovered and proved. Professors are convinced these steps are crucial. Sure, I think there is something to be said for understanding the theory behind a model or function, but goodness gracious we never use those proofs again. And we spend very, very little time working with real world data and never any of the large datasets that have become so common. There's some balance between blindly learning how to use a tool and understanding the tool's entire backstory and manufacturing process. 

And there's a ton of free data out there, but there's also my own data. There's stuff that's automatically kept track for me, like bank transactions, cell phone data etc. I decided to play with my own Facebook data. Due to Facebook's stringent API, you can't really access their stuff by a scraping algorithm. So I took my own data myself. Copy and paste. Went through all my statuses and took down the time of posting, the number of likes, comments, and then whether the status was a joke, pun, announcement, topical, language-related, a link, a check-in, a holiday etc. I know, I'm ridiculous. But I really wanted to practice and not lose out on the value of my education. While at the Census Bureau, I read a lot of statistics papers that I no longer recall, but I also attended a very popular talk by Dr. Nathan Yau, at the time a Statistics PhD student who had just published a book on visualizing data. He lectured on the value and techniques behind awesome data visualizations, and I was hooked. I bought his book and follow his blog (flowingdata.com). I still haven't come up with any graphics worthy of his blog, but I tried here. I started with a simple plot of the post likes vs time and colored them in differently based on some of the metrics I recorded. 

 

The data is actually quite fun to play with. There's a few motivating variables to analyze. For starters, I want to see how often I pun, and whether these tend to be the most popular posts. It turns out they're not! The graph to the left actually graphs 6 variables. There's time on the x axis and # of likes on the y axis. Blue dots are puns. The size of the dot indicates the number of shares the post has had (most have 0 and a few have 1), and actually the color of the dots are different for posts judged to be "topical." Posts that are squares are picture posts. However, I feel pretty strongly now that most humans can really only grasp 4 variables. Yeah if you stare long enough you can try to understand them all, but after 4 the mind really has to work. I redid the graph with a log y-axis, which I think looks a bit better but doesn't make the popular posts look as impressive. For the record, puns make up 18.6% of the last 3 year's posts. 

I also used the wordcloud package to pick some of my most used words. This is a good package and once I downloaded it, I really didn't have to do much. The results are quite pleasing and cool. Note that <97> represents some Chinese character - I can't get Chinese character display working on my R.

Well those days are pretty even, but Sundays are fun days aren't they. Sunday's have the highest mean likes, but this graph shows that Thursdays have the highest median. The results aren't very drastic though, and just looking at the sample variances one can see that the differences might not stand up to a test of robustness. Add in the fact that these times are all Hong Kong based but not all posts were, and I wouldn't publish an academic paper advising Thursday posts. As a note I'm a big fan of boxplots, but not everyone learns how to read them, and it seems like they might be a legacy of older statistics that'll seem too clunky in this new age.

If you notice though, none of what I've done has involved any sort of fancy modeling. Maybe my experience has been limited, but it seems most of the value of data science is relatively simple. Most often at work I'm asked "what's the average energy use for a tall office tower?" All I have to do is type in a simple query, but this is a service simply not available before we had the database. It doesn't involve any explanation to math illiterates, or model validation. With my Facebook example, just having the database in the first place setup to allow these useful queries is the main step. This is primarily why the data science game is shifted towards computer scientists right now. The market demand is to get data in all the right places rather than advanced statistical modeling, so you need programmers to scrape data or design apps or programs that continually feed in usable data and store it. You'll need a few Statistics PhD's scattered around to come up with the original algorithms, but everyone else just has to learn how they work.

Here's one more graph with comments and likes together:

But anyway, I want to just post my own favorite statuses. These are not the ones with the most statistical properties, just my own faves:

• My mom asks me if I want a home sound system for my birthday - I tell her thanks but I'm not the stereo-type.
• I'm being asked at work to write an "inception report." I'm not sure what that means, but I hope it doesn't involve a report within a report.
• England is to football as Iraq is to civilization. Sure they might have invented it, but you could argue other countries are doing it better now.
• The Hong Kong Football Association reportedly paid about $30million HKD to get the Argentine National team to come play in tonight's friendly against the 164 ranked Hong Kong team. I guess this is the second time this month that the government has paid a group of men to beat up on Hong Kongers."
• Once upon a time, Georgetown and Syracuse had a rivalry. Georgetown won. The end.
• Sometimes I do my own crossword puzzles, which I no longer remember. And then when I solve a particularly clever clue, I feel pumped that I solved the clue and more pumped that I wrote it. #lowselfesteem
• Reading from a Kindle is not helping my shelf esteem.
• China doesn't have a Mount Rushmore, it just has a Mao-nt.
• Sometimes my phone says "Call Failed" and I think it says "Cal Failed" and I'm like come on, I really don't need you to rub it in.

Running Diary

The last week of October was the strangest week I've had in Hong Kong, moving out from my Kennedy Town apartment to a family farmhouse outside the Aberdeen tunnel isolated from urban convenience. This move was followed two days later by a stay at the hospital for a nasal surgery and then several days of recovery at another uncle's actual apartment. When I emerged from this strange week, I could breathe out my nose, my voice had changed, my sleep schedule had adapted to early morning Aberdeen buses, and I hadn't really hung out with people for over a week, an interminable length for an extrovert.

The following weekend that all changed. It was Tommy and Jana's long awaited wedding day Saturday night, and Colin Erickson-Sheehy's farewell weekend in Shenzhen. In addition, I had forgotten that this was Georgetown's International Alumni Weekend hosted in Hong Kong. For me, this alumni event was merely a Google Calendar event but others were flying in from all over the world. Paul Tagliabue, Nancy Pelosi, Senator George Mitchell and President John DeGoia were among the appearances. How to prioritize?

I figured that while I would party with Colin the following weekend in Manila, I had really promised to come up to Shenzhen many times. And whenever I'd gone to Shenzhen to party, I'd not been disappointed. I couldn't make the Georgetown weekend's main events anyway because of the wedding, so I made my plan. When I learned I had a meeting Friday night with Swire, necessitating fancy clothes, and needed a followup doctor's appointment, well things got complicated. But I managed, and kept notes as well. I'll take off at the end of the meeting.

Friday, November 6, 2015
5:47pm: The meeting had started in 3:30 and at one point descended into a shitshow, but luckily I was able to leave at this time. My boss has sometimes been stuck in there until 7:30. I navigate out of the Swire buildings footbridge systems, which was incidentally what the meeting was about, and jump onto the MTR towards Central.
6:22pm: Enter Dr. Victor To's office. I'd said I'd be there at 5:45, but they always overbook anyways and turns out showing up late means I have to wait less time.
6:30pm: In fact I wait like 8 minutes. The doctor sticks a scope up my nose and proceeds to poke around in my sinus, and looks confused when I scream in pain.
6:40pm: Doctor decides to end my torture. Says my nose is a lot better but I still have to come back next Monday and Thursday and finish getting dried blood out of my sinus. I currently have undried blood flowing out my sinus. Tells me my sinus will stop bleeding in a few minutes
6:45pm: Holding a tissue to my bloody nose, I decide to risk venturing out to Central.
7:09pm: Show up at the Watermark Cafe at the central piers. The event is more formal than I was expecting. Staff are tabling at the door handing out nametags. I'm glad I'm dressed in a suit instead of my typical casual Friday clothes, or my Shenzhen party gear. Someone is speaking already, which is frighteningly early for an event that started at 7:00pm. He's saying something about international development and is name dropping countries - Vietnam, Myanmar, Laos and Philippines - like he's announcing ASEAN bingo.
7:12pm: Cool Vincent Ko is here. I last saw him a year ago when he visited Hong Kong. Apparently he's in Ho Chi Minh City now.
7:15pm: Caroline Kwok is here. I last saw her last night. She is very, very excited about this weekend.
7:20pm: Jas Wee is here. I last saw her at the end of December, but she lives in Hong Kong so this is less excusable.
7:22pm: There's a minibar of hors d'oevres and I raid the hell out of it. There are Brie & Gorgonzola crackers which are better than anything I ever ate at Georgetown. My university definitely treats its alumni better than its student body.
8:10pm: I've had more glasses of champagne (3) then met people not working in finance.
8:40pm: Meet someone who studied full time at the SFS Qatar campus and knows two of my friends who worked there. He speaks Turkish, Arabic, Armenian and English fluently.
8:44pm: For the first time in my life, someone says "Hi this is Cal Lee and he's interested in going to Armenia." I'm not sure how that happened but it was definitely an escalation in conversation.
9:10pm: Find three other people from my year, Susie O'hare, Abby Zhang and Winston Wang, and talk about 27 year old Hong Kong things.
9:30pm: Realize we've closed out the party. Head on downstairs and wait for the ferry across to TST, cause I mean it's right there.
9:49pm: Man Hong Kong is beautiful tonight. Everyone on the ferry seems to be a tourist.
10:05pm: Was going to meet up with Nick Tsao and go to Shenzhen together, but he seems way behind schedule. Decide I have time to drop off my fancy clothes at work and change. 
10:05pm: There are still 4 coworkers at work who don't seem to hate the fact that they're still working at 10pm on a Friday night. I tell them I'm slightly drunk and on my way to Shenzhen to get more drunk.
10:23pm: I drape my jacket, pants and tie over my chair and bounce down to the light rail line in tshirt and shorts.
11:05pm: I race through the border crossing at Lo Wu and fill my form in expert fashion. I have a new passport now but my China visa is in my old passport, so I expertly hand my passports to immigration open to the right places. The woman seems unfazed by this and stamps me through.
11:07pm: Swarmed by people offering black cab rides. Make the mistake of saying "screw off, I'm taking the metro." Informed the metro is closed. Guy follows me for 100 yards before I tell him he's bothering me and losing money.
11:10pm: Shit, the line for taxis is really long. Damnit China.
11:15pm: I actually offer my destination to a soliciting black cab driver. He asks me to name a price. I say 50 kuai and he laughs me off.
11:14pm: He comes back with 80 kuai and I laugh him off. Two beggars also approach aggressively and initiate physical contact. I have plenty of spare change but I don't appreciate the aggressiveness in a port of entry.
11:35pm: Taxi ride exposes my rusty Mandarin, like when Isaid diaozhuan instead of diaotou. Taxi driver comes within 100 yards of my destination before turning off into a side street for no clear reason. Drops me off and tells me it should be somewhere near here. Thanks shiji.
1140pm: The bar is called Hawa. I run the last half block and excitedly see the name. I run up the stairs like a kid on Christmas morning and almost into a bar called Sugar. Apparently Hawa is the basement bar. I awkwardly walk back down the stairs and enter.
11:41pm: Colin is the first person I see. He totally was not expecting me to come and gives me a huge hug. He's like "we're heading off to KTV, but you can order a beer or something. Oh wait, someone ordered a rum and coke and didn't finish it. Perfect, you can have his leftovers."
11:43pm: I realize I've been here before. I've been to like 4 bars in Shenzhen,  a city of 12 million, and this is one of them.
11:50pm: Everyone gathers outside to head to KTV. Matt Sexton hands me a bowl of punch with 3 straws.
12:05am: A KTV building is conveniently located across the street. There's a piano in the lobby and drunk people go and excitedly hit keys. Sexton's girlfriend Irene can actually play and starts Fur Elise. The keys are hopelessly out of tune like they left the piano through a typhoon. Nonetheless, I beseech to play next and Sexton is like "Irene, let Cal play." I put the bowl of punch off to the side and start playing. It takes 15 bars but Glenn Cornell exclaims, "it's Piano Man!" I don't get far in the song because apparently the black keys are purely ornamental
12:13am: We head upstairs to the real KTV action and there's another piano there. This one actually works. Colin calls on me to perform and for the first time in my life, I play Piano Man to an adoring audience. I miss half the notes.
12:17am: Colin opens up the KTV performance to Avril Lavigne's Complicated. Hits all the high notes. Bruno Mars follows.
12:20am: There's a proper mic stand and Glenn is all over it.
12:25am: The KTV has like a supermarket aisle to purchase singing help. We scoop up a couple dozen cans of cheap beer.
12:45am: The song choices are not randomized, which means the 3 songs I picked come one after another. I crush 2 of the Chinese songs I know and then One Thing by One Direction, which is like One Squared, which is also One.
12:54am: Finish my songs and decide to upgrade from the cheap beer. I was thinking of a going away present for Colin, so a bottle of whiskey during this session seems appropriate. While it might not make sense to pay 800 kuai for this bottle when I wouldn't pay 80 kuai for a cab ride earlier, it did to me at that point.
12:57am: The cashier is unable to process my credit card. She asks me if I got this credit card in Shenzhen. I race my mind trying to think if I've had other encounters where a Chinese credit card machine only took local credit cards. Would this machine process credit cards from Guangzhou? I don't think that's how credit cards work? The beer challenges this recollection process.
1:05am: Run outside to the nearest ATM. At some point I knew how to say ATM in Mandarin, and that they used a different word in Taiwan, but right now I just use 銀行. Run back with 500 kuai like I just robbed a very poor bank.
1:10am: The whiskey arrives and people are confused like there's been a mistake. Well if there was a mistake, I made it.
1:15am: Nobody is drinking the whiskey. Aggressively pour out 8 glasses of whiskey and coke and hand them to people.
1:16am: Oh God there is not enough coke in this glass.
1:33am: Lots of songs.
1:52am: Make Colin do a shot of whiskey with me. I remind him about that time I first met him and he wouldn't let me play with him.
2:08am: There's been like a run of this female pop star.  I can't remember her name but it's all these catchy songs from the last few years. No, not Rihanna, a bit more annoying than her. No, more talented than Miley Cyrus. Less talented than Lady Gaga. Oh it's Katy Perry. My goodness we've sang so many Katy Perry songs.
2:20-2:45am: Complete black hole.
2:45am: Roldy says let's go.
Sometime in the middle of the night: Glenn comes out of his bedroom naked to take a piss. Sees me passed out on the floor and is like "ah who the hell is that?!"
9:30am: Wake up on the carpet of a strange apartment. Complete discombobulation lasts 3 seconds. Pleasantly surprised to find that phone is charged. Piss out about a gallon of processed alcohol from the Pearl River Delta region. Discover there's a mop in the bathroom.
11:50am: Roldy comes out of his room and wakes us up.
11:53am: Celine comes out of her room looking remarkably not dishevelled. Glenn comes out in a bathrobe. I suddenly realize how hungover I am. Drink two bottles of water.
12:50pm: Lunch in a classy cafe that serves quesadillas. Glenn and I act very American. I ask for 3 glasses of water.
1:15pm: Glenn reveals he only just learned that Tommy and Jana were dating.
1:50pm: Oh shit. How did I spend so much time at lunch? Shit I have to be at Hang Hau at 3:30pm to take the shuttle bus to the wedding in Clearwater Bay. And I kinda need to take a dump. No time for that.
2:00pm: Taxi reaches the Huanggang border. Oh I had found 35 kuai in coins while cleaning out my apartment. I pay the driver in coins. He is not amused.
2:02pm: Line to cross immigration is depressingly long. Mentally calculate every minute of my journey time to my office, changing time, and time to Clearwater Bay. I think I need to take some taxis. This is that border crossing that is so long you need to take a bus in between.
2:23pm: Reach the Hong Kong side and get on a Mong Kok bound bus. The hangover is quite real. I begin to have my first regrets of going to Shenzhen. Still need to take a dump.
3:00pm: Still on the bus. Concede shuttle bus defeat.
3:02pm: Man I really need to take a dump. But I realize I need to take out cash for the wedding Lai See present. Balls. Redirect route planning to the HSBC ATMs in Pioneer Center because my office building doesn't have an ATM except inside the MTR station.
3:05pm: Bus finally lands and I run off. Almost vomit on the streets of Mong Kok but rein it in. Dash to the Pioneer Centre.
3:08pm: There are 15 people in line for the ATM. WTF. Immediate regrets not going into the MTR station ATM.
3:27pm: Finally make it back to my office. Take my clothes into the bathroom. Details will be omitted here but let's just say I took that dump and changed into my suit within 4 minutes.
3:31pm: Put on my American tie for the first time. Tie was given as an award in 2012 and is so ridiculous looking that I've never worn it. Crush a bottle of cranberry juice that I have at work and run down to get a taxi.
4:00pm: Taxi ride to Clearwater Bay Golf & Country Club is very long, and there are lots of winding roads once you leave civilization. The hangover intensifies exponentially with car sickness. Stealthily lower the window slightly.
4:10pm: Reach the country club and stumble outside the taxi. Try to gauge whether I can make it to a bathroom. Can't. I make it as far as a small bush next to the entrance before yaking. The cranberry juice comes right out. Hold my tie against me as I throw up more water.
4:11pm: I'm still throwing up. Food is coming out now. This is a low moment in my life.
4:12pm: Finally done throwing up. Turn around and see Clay Carol and Kim Alexandersen staring at me. "Are you ok? We thought you were an elderly man suffering a heart attack or something."
4:13pm: Wedding time.