While I just spent the past two years in Boston for my MBA at Harvard Business School, I happened to experience it as a "tourist" across the seasons. For continuity, let's start with winter 2022.
During this period, I was weirdly living a dual life: I spent half my time traveling out and about as though COVID were a distant memory (with friends or for work), or completely entrenched in an antisocial hermit life back home in Mississauga. Fear not, come summer 2022, things on this blog will go back to regularly scheduled programming.
In late 2020, I fell DEEP down the BTS rabbit hole. Thanks to my active contributions to the /r/bangtan subreddit, I lucked out and was able to purchase Day 2 tickets to their short four-day Permission to Dance concert in LA (which they then brought to Vegas and Seoul for similar stints). This was like the Eras tour before Taylor Swift dreamt of it: a "greatest hits" concert that compiled all of BTS's COVID-era releases and served as their pre-military sendoff. I was so thankful to see BTS at this time in my life, when they were most important to me. As the saying goes, BTS is there when you need them the most. And during the COVID lockdown era, boy, did I need them!
My workplace enabled me to participate in a special analytics training. Little did I know how lucky I was: in 2019, the program gave me an excuse to visit Miami, which turned out to be the last cohort before the program went virtual due to COVID. Naturally, others like Cait and Malcolm decided to opportunistically seize the opportunity to tour around over the weekend with me.
In 2019, a lot of my closest friends lived in San Francisco. With just one Bubble Republic planning session, Steph and I decided to book flights for an ambitious road trip with Cora in and around the Bay area (IN A TESLA!!).
A while ago, I got the scintillating opportunity to visit... the Canadian prairies in the wintertime. I don't know why I thought it would be a good idea to fly to Saskatoon and Calgary in -35ยบC weather two years in a row, but I did (and lived to tell the tale!).
After some fun by the surf, it was time for the turf (lol)! Welcome to San Igancio, the jungle-y inland of Belize. I'm SO glad we split up the trip into these two distinct regions. It added a lot of variety and made me appreciate both aspects of the country.
When I asked Jenny to go on a trip with me again in 2019, her first response was, "When are we going?" Although Jenny and I don't see each other that often these days, she remains the perfect travel partner. We pretty much learned how to travel "independently" together, and have created our own seamless travel style that's fast-paced, highly mobile, and full of elaborate activities and delicious food. You could even say we... run on autopilot (had to squeeze in an aviation pun!).