In my last post, I commented on the homogeneity of South Korea regarding the lack of foreign food available.  In this post I will assert my observations about Korean fashion that I have accumulated in the past 9 weeks and how I believe Korean fashion also contributes to the homogeneity of this country.

One general note: all Koreans, men and women alike, are very much into looking their best at all times.  You will never see a young Korean girl without face make-up to create flawless skin, nor will you ever see her with a bad hair day.  The men are also very conscious of their appearance and look immaculate in their work outfits at all times.

WARNING: As with many of my observational posts, this information is not intended to evoke prejudice or discrimination in any way.  These are simply things that I notice as a silly American pretending to be cool enough to be as stylish as a Korean.  Koreans are very into aesthetics and looking nice all the time, so clearly I am a boring, backpacking half-breed compared to the skinny, perfect skinned, stylish Koreans on the subways.

I have observed that fashion in Korea is generally on two opposite ends of the spectrum for both men and women.  Please take the following observations into consideration:

For women:

• The main unofficial uniform for women is simply the following: apatterned (usually some sort of tiny floral pattern) mini-dress with a built-in elastic belt at the waist, a black or navy blue blazer, a messy bun on the crown of the head, black tights, and very high black heels.
• The main unofficial uniform for “casually dressed” women is the following: 80’s acid washed jeans (skinny jeans, of course), a t-shirt, a very long cardigan, and a pair of Converse sneakers.
• For hair, almost every woman has very thick blunt-cut bangs and some shade of orange/copper as the remnants of a previous dye job.  Having dark hair myself, I shed a tear for every woman with a pumpkin-colored ‘do.  I feel their pain.  I know what it’s like for bleach to turn my hair orange.

For men:

• All-black suit, and tie for work.  Nothing else.
• The men’s casual attire consists of the following: they also wear jeans, Converse sneakers, a hoodie, and always…. ALWAYS…. a Major League Baseball hat.  We have received confirmation from our trusty 15 year old Korean friend that MLB hats here are simply worn for style, and do not represent any type of loyalty to their favorite team.  It’s actually quite interesting to see all of these Koreans wearing MLB hats because at first we were amazed at how popular American baseball is in Korea.  We saw tons of Yankees hats, A’s hats, Red Sox hats and thought “this is awesome!”  But then we started seeing hats for the Royals and the Pirates….
• Asian hair is very straight and coarse, and one of the most popular styles that I have seen is the deep side-part with side bangs and very, very jagged razored layers.  Just think “very emo”.
• Another interesting thing I’ve noticed: there are quite a few “bowl cuts” amongst many grown men here.  Not sure if it’s to be funny or if it’s just a really ahead-of-its-time, innovative style that I don’t understand yet.

As I write this post, I am on a bus from Seoul to Daegu, so I await in anticipation to see if the fashion in Daegu is just as “same-sies” as Seoul!

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Looking at our older posts, I realized I may not have fully explained why Sharon and I quit our Silicon Valley jobs and are now planning on spending a year (minimum) traveling around Asia. I wanted to take this opportunity to explain further.

In my inspiration post I wrote about how my once-a-year 10-day vacations just weren’t cutting it. During these excursions, the people I met were often traveling for 6-months to a year and some even longer. Most of these people were from other countries, but it led me to believe that long-term traveling was something I had to try…and sooner rather than later.

So, why now?

The first factor was that, frankly, I began growing tired of my cubicle job. I thoroughly enjoyed the people I worked with, but working for a large corporation where my hard work at the end of the week really did not mean all that much, was something I realized I needed to change. If I worked my butt off and did a really kick-ass job, what did that mean for me? Not that much really—perhaps we’d sell a few more units, make a few more bucks, causing our stock price to rise a half-penny at the end of the quarter. I was ready for a career change and this trip will give me an opportunity to try my hands at working for myself. Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos.com, recently tweeted that work life balance is for people who don’t love their jobs – I agree. I want to love my job. I didn’t love my cube job.

The second factor – putting my MBA on hold. In April of 2007 I began attending Santa Clara University in pursuit of my MBA. My company paid a good chunk of the tuition, so I figured it was worth the investment. I was nearly done with my 2^nd year when, because of the recession (and poor execution), my company gave us a 10% salary cut and also cut our tuition reimbursement benefit. Santa Clara is a private school and was too expensive for me to continue.

Sharon was also interested in a career change. She was working a corporate cubicle job as well, and again she liked it, but she’s always known that her true calling in life was working with kids. She had the opportunity to do that prior to the corporate job, but alas making the big bucks was too tempting and she quit and went off to cube-land. With this current transition she can now use the time to begin thinking about becoming an elementary school teacher. I’ve even encouraged her to look into getting her credential online while we travel.

The last reason we’re making this happen now is that we’re still pretty young—we have no mortgage and no kids to feed. There’s no better time than the present!

Final thought for this extremely long post: I have nothing against large corporations. Working in a cube for a large corporation certainly has its perks — I may very well end up back in one. However, for us, right now, we’re trying to start our life after cubes, and I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited.

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3. The Difficult Life of a Korean Student

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Two posts ago, I wrote about how our trip was beginning with a 40-hour layover due to Air Canada cancelling our initial connecting flight to Hong Kong. Air Canada had chosen not to put us up in a hotel or grant our request to stay in Vancouver a few extra days, and apparently had expected us to spend 2 nights in the Vancouver airport. After writing the post, I decided to also send my story (and link to the post) to Air Canada to let them know about our upcoming travel experience. Two days later I received an email from Air Canada from an agent that felt that our situation needed to be rectified. After verifying my phone number, she gave me a call and asked whether we would prefer to have a hotel for our 2-night layover in Vancouver or if we’d prefer to extend our stay. After considering, I decided to extend our stay to Sunday. She said she would speak with a booking agent and send me a confirmation email with my updated itinerary. Two hours later, we received our updated itinerary and now had 6 days to explore beautiful Vancouver! The trip now begins with an essentially free trip to Vancouver.  Sharon and I are extremely excited about this! Asking certainly pays dividends!

For now, however, we wait. We’re anxious to get our trip started but we’re also still tired from the weekend. With the extra time in Vancouver, we now have the luxury to take things slow — sleep in and hopefully really enjoy the city.

As a reminder, on the side of our blog, we have our Google Latitude which we’ll try to update daily with our location.

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The to do list is essentially complete. Here’s an update:

Things to buy:

Steripen – Thanks to my friend Scott, we were able to get the Steripen and a few other items from REI with a nice discount. Thanks Scott!

Things to sell:

Car – I’m having a tough time selling my car. Thankfully I’m not in dire need of actually selling it before we leave. My Dad has volunteered to help me sell it while I’m gone. I’ve also been considering keeping it, so I can have it for when I come back.

Bed, Dressers, Desk – All gone! A lady from San Francisco came over interested in one piece of furniture, she ended up leaving with 2 dressers, a TV stand, our desk and our night-stand. In one night our room was empty, you can see pictures in Sharon’s last post.

Things to do:

All that is left is to pack our cars and deliver some of our things to our parents!

——————————

It’s going to be an exciting and very busy next few days! The next post will most likely be from Vancouver — where thanks to Air Canada and my last post, we’ll now be spending 6 days! More about that in my next post!

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1. To Do List Update #2
2. To Do List Update #1
3. Financial Update – 9 Months of Travel

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Our first stop in Asia is Hong Kong. I thought I would fill everyone in on the upcoming fun we’ll be experiencing to get there.

A few months ago now, we were searching for the cheapest airfare to almost anywhere in Asia (we had no preference on where to start). We were able to find a flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong for only $350 (one-way) on Air Canada. We were ecstatic! The layover in Vancouver was only going to be a couple hours and we would have left Monday, October 19th and arrived in Hong Kong, Tuesday the 20th. Unfortunately, as we went to book the ticket, we got an error, requiring us to restart the search process. After restarting, the flight was no longer available (it probably sold-out as we were booking). The good news though, was that there was another flight for $350, also through Vancouver, however, with a 16-hour layover. We would arrive in Vancouver on Monday, the 19th at 10:00pm, sleep in the airport and then depart Tuesday the 20th at 2:00pm. Perhaps we would even have time to check out some of Vancouver. With more time on our hands than money, we decided to book the tickets.

This past Saturday night at 8pm I received a call from a friendly gentlemen informing me that our Vancouver flight to Hong Kong on the 20th was cancelled and he would like to put us on a flight the next day at 2:00pm. I thought about it and realized this now meant a 40-hour layover! I kindly asked if they would be willing to put us up in a hotel, considering we’d be at the Vancouver airport now for 2 nights. The answer? Nope!

Our other options? A 3-day trip from SFO to Vancouver to Tokyo to Hong Kong which did not sound in the least bit appealing. I declined that. Sharon and I had discussed trying to extend our layover in Vancouver a few days to see the city, so I tried to see if we could change our layover from 2 nights to 4 nights. Nope! Air Canada is fine with leaving us in the airport for 2 nights, but 4 nights is out of the question apparently. With one final last ditch effort, I tried to get us upgraded to business class. A big “No” on that one also.

Out of options, we chose to go with the 40-hour, no hotel layover in Vancouver. The good news now, is that we will have nearly 2-days to check out Vancouver. We’ve both never been there and have heard really great things! To be fair to Air Canada, our flights are extremely cheap, but is putting us up in Motel 6 really such a big deal? Apparently it is.

Update: After emailing this post to Air Canada, I received a response 2 days later, asking whether we’d prefer a hotel for the 2-night layover or to extend our stay in Vancouver — we chose to extend! Writing about the experience and sending them an email paid off! Read the full update.

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I guess the main reason people have been asking us this question is to pinpoint where we classify ourselves along the spectrum of travel: on one extreme there is the possibility of toting a tent and setting up camp in open spaces, while the opposite extreme would be enjoying first class flights to our hotels.  I am happy to report that the first extreme regarding living in tents for a year is not in the cards for us.  I am a fan of camping but the thought of a. carrying around a tent, b. having to set up the tent in every location, and c… living in a tent for a year, makes me feel like i should just forget about packing deodorant and grow out some dreads.

The reality is that we would be somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.  For the most part we plan on using hostels and riding trains as much as possible from city to city.  Obviously, we will be attempting to hit most major cities initially, but once we are there we will be branching out towards smaller cities and seeing the more rural areas as well.  Every now and then we will be enjoying the convenience of single sized shampoos at hotels but, according to Jason, not too often (although I may be able to finagle it more often once we’re there).

I am going to coin a general theme of this trip, which is “economic indulgence“.  By that, I mean that we have a budget, but we have also included some daily padding within it to allow for more of a comfortable lifestyle rather than limiting ourselves to just the bare bones to survive.  We don’t plan on traveling by foot, but we will make sure that our train, bus, flight, etc. will be the best deal we can find.

Random Thought of the Night: We have been steadily selling off our furniture for the past few weeks, but last night we hit the jackpot when someone came and picked up EVERY PIECE of furniture in our room.  You know how parents always call their childrens’ messy rooms a “pigsty”?  Imagine the contents of not one, but two people’s entire room strewn out on the floor, and then imagine a futon pad lying on the floor as the bed.  Take that image and add two grown adults.  That is the trainwreck that is currently our room.

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Sharon’s sister, Onion Jennie, came to Sharon and myself with an idea to pitch our travel plans as a show to The Travel Channel. When I heard about this, I couldn’t believe the irony — independently, I had been thinking the exact same thing just a couple days earlier but had not mentioned it to anyone. After hearing about Jennie’s recommendation I decided it was indeed worth a try to pitch our travel plans to the Travel Channel.

But the question is, how do you go about pitching an idea to the Travel Channel? This post will explain how I found 30 high-quality leads and was able to send them an email for free using social media.

*Note – All names below have been changed.*

I started with Facebook — Facebook allows you to search for people based on their workplace.

Doing this gave me a list of about 130 people. Not everyone on this list is going to be helpful though, as I’m really looking for people that are in charge of the channel’s content. The next step was to take a few of the names I found on Facebook and search for them on LinkedIn to find more information about what they actually do at the Travel Channel.

Tip: Put the company name into your search as well, so a common name doesn’t turn up too many results.

This part will probably take some trial and error, as you look for someone with the right job function at the company. A good way to speed up this process is to find out where the office of the place you’re looking for is located. Travel Channel is located in Washington DC, so I filtered my results further on this. Once you find one person in the department you’re looking for, you’re typically golden. From here I recommend using LinkedIn to find other people from that persons particular department. Using LinkedIn’s “Viewers of this profile also viewed…” feature, you usually can find colleagues with similar positions to the person you’ve found.

From here, I start writing a list of all of the names of people I’d like to contact. You’re not going to get responses from everyone, so I recommend trying to make the list as long as possible. My experience with the Travel Channel was we sent out 11 emails and got 2 responses. Not the greatest response rate, but good enough to find out the information we were looking for.

After you have your list of names, it’s back to Facebook to actually find those people and send them a message. By default, Facebook allows you to send an email to anyone–LinkedIn costs a considerable amount of money to do this. Most people are on both.

Rather than typing in the person’s name on Facebook, I would recommend using another Facebook feature that allows you to browse the friends of anyone. Again, using my Travel Channel example, I found a good contact at the Travel Channel, I knew the list of people I wanted to contact, and I simply looked through their friends to find the people I was looking for.

Clicking their name, brings you to their profile, where again, you should be able to send them a message.

Advice on the email

My advice on the email is to create a brief commercial. Try to make the subject line interesting so they open the email. We went with:

“25-year old couple quit comfortable cubicle lives and move to Cambodia”

The actual email should be brief and to the point. I recommend bullets and never forget your call-to-action at the end. Do you want them to go to a website, email you back, talk to someone else? Always ask for the close!

So, what happened with us and the Travel Channel?

Unfortunately, you’re not going to be seeing Sharon and me on the Travel Channel anytime soon. It turns out that the Travel Channel does not produce any original content. They work with producers who have to finance the project themselves, submit the idea to Travel Channel, then cross their fingers the Travel Channel will pay the producer for the episodes and air it on TV. This discouraged us when we realized that the process was going to be a lot more difficult than we initially thought.

Our last attempt was to talk with a producer. My Dad happens to know someone who shoots travel movies and I got in contact with him. He was excited about the idea and thought there was potential, but at this point we only had 2 months before we left for our trip and it just wasn’t enough time. His recommendation was to use our blog to promote our own video’s and to shoot and edit the video’s ourselves.

I think we’ll take this advice and shoot video from time-to-time. Perhaps there’s still some hope that we’ll get our 15 minutes of fame after all.

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It’s all starting to feel a little surreal. I was in the gym today and realized that this will probably be one of the last times I workout in that particular gym. It’s a strange feeling. I’m so use to my routine that it’s hard to imagine not getting up in the same bed, not going to the same gym, and not going to work to the same cube. This is essentially all I’ve known the last 4+ years.

I’m obviously excited, but also starting to get a little nervous with so much change coming so quickly. Not having a steady paycheck and watching my savings continually drain is slightly nerve-wracking.

At the end of the trip though, I highly doubt that I’ll regret the decision to go. For now, it will be interesting to see the next couple of weeks how many more of these “holy crap, we’re actually doing this” moments I have.

Surreal photo by Martin Finlayson.

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Things to Sell:

The next two weeks are all about selling our stuff!

Car – I’ve listed it on Craigslist, but haven’t heard much of a response. I have a 2005 Honda Civic Hybrid with carpool stickers that allow you to drive solo in the carpool lane. The car is valued around $11,000 and I’m trying to sell it for $15,000 — putting a $4,000 premium for the carpool stickers. I’m concerned I’ve priced it too high. I’ve also heard that cash for clunkers has really hurt the used car market. I plan on reducing the price of the car every couple of days.

Bed, Dresser, Desk, etc.. – Listing them this week, our room could empty out very quickly!

To Do:

Health/Travelers Insurance – I did a good amount of research and finally went with the company that apparently everyone goes with, World Nomads (That’s an affiliate link, if you decide to use them, I’d appreciate you using that link). It seems like a great deal. Essentially you have a copay of $1o0, meaning it’s really just for emergencies (which is good because in most parts of the world, basic health care is very inexpensive). They also cover you during adventure activities including snowboarding, skydiving, bungee jumping, etc. Not saying I’ll be doing those things, but it’s good to know that I can! They also cover you if you’re robbed. Unfortunately, they only cover $500 for all electronics, but for Sharon and I that works well because our netbooks were only $300.

Change Banks – I will most likely create a separate post on this. I ended up changing from Bank Of America to Charles Schwab. I’m optimistic about Charles Schwab. There are no charges and no minimums. The real selling point is that they reimburse you for using other firms ATM’s, including international ATM’s. This should make traveling with cash much cheaper.

Credit Card – Again did quite a bit of research and ended up going with the Capital One No Hassles Reward card. What’s great about them is they don’t charge any international fees, so this should keep the cost of using credit cards quite reasonable.

Get all of our shots – I believe we each got around 5-6 shots (and Sharon is still getting one today). But we’re all vaccinated!

2 weeks left but still have a lot of things to take care of! Updated to-do list.

Picture of the Hong Kong Skyline by Feistypoo.

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The question I’m going to answer in this post is how we saved up so much money. While this post is specific for planning a vacation (or mini-retirement), it’s applicable to saving for anything: wedding, car, house, boat, etc…

The “Twitter” answer is automation. As soon as your paycheck hits your bank account your money should automatically be withdrawn and go into your savings. Here’s how you can do that:

Step 1 – Figuring out how much you need to save
When Sharon and I first started thinking about the trip we put together the following table. This gave us a few different scenarios based on how long we were planning on staying, how much we wanted to spend per day and how long we had to save.

We ultimately decided that around $60 per day was a good amount. (Although the more research I’ve done, it sounds like this is on the higher end of how much money is needed — which is great because the money will last longer!)

This spreadsheet will also tell you how much money you need to save per paycheck. Which is the key to the next step.

Download the savings spreadsheet (.xls)

Step 2 – Automating the savings
Now that you’ve determined how much money you need to save, the most important step is automating the savings. By using the spreadsheet, it will do the math for you on how much you need to save per paycheck. The key to saving, is to have it automatically come out of your paycheck or bank account, otherwise it just won’t happen.

To enable this, I recommend setting up an ING Direct account. They have pretty good interest rates, and they also allow you to setup multiple sub-accounts within your primary account. The sub-accounts are great for creating different account buckets to save for different things. For example, I had a sub-account that I saved for this trip, grad school, and a house down payment. All of these sub-accounts automatically pulled money out of my primary bank account the day my paycheck arrived.

Extra’s
Another great way to throw in a few bucks now and then is when extra money arrives. Your annual IRS refund is a great example or if you get a bonus from work. Even small things, like a mail-in-rebate check, you can throw into savings. These are all examples of unplanned money that your budget most likely doesn’t count on. If you can normally manage without it, why not just save it?

Step 3 – Let the automation roll
Depending on how much you’ve already saved and how much you want to save, it may take a while to get your target amount, but the great thing about this method is it’s guaranteed. Once you turn on the automation, you can begin counting down to your own dream vacation (or house, or car, or whatever…)

Feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions.

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