Before Leaving
I am writing this part about an hour after returning from Japan: WOAH. That was a lot- it lasted only twelve days, but there’s so much to explore and see in Japan that it might as well have taken a few times longer. I have more than enough stories to tell here- I already teased this trip while writing VN2023 and UV2023, where I said we’d be going with another family friend named Derek and his older brother, Jason. Derek is a bit younger than I am and a very energetic kid who can make just about anything fun, so I was looking forward to everything ahead.
…Derek and I were chatting away for most of the night. Our families are currently in the middle of planning a huge trip to Japan as I’m writing this. The trip is in the summer of 2024, and I’m very excited to begin writing about it when I can.
Excerpt from UV2023.
And finally, that time has come- seven months after UV2023, we would be meeting Derek again and were ready to go with him to Japan for 12 days to see Japan behind the thick illusion of anime and sushi that society has had. I can certainly say there’s far more to Japan than just the stereotypes. Everyone in our household would be going, except for my grandma, who doesn’t travel except for frequent visits to her relatives.
Because we were going to a foreign country for twelve days, we also needed to pack up a lot…. We honestly just procrastinated all of it until the last day- we all had other interests we wanted to pursue and packing our bags just felt like a chore that no one wanted to work on until the last minute – we ended up quickly setting up all our stuff in the last few days before we left on July 22, putting them into six bags: These two huge red and purple ones, as well as four smaller luggage that varied on color. All six of this luggage were already veterans- we’d used them during the VN2023 trip last year and two of the smaller luggage (a black and a white one, each having these fancy graphics of world landmarks on them) we’d been using for over a decade.
From what we were told before the trip, we’d be able to go straight to the country of Japan and immediately get free data there- so unless something was to go wrong soon, we had little to worry about our phone data. After a bit of back-and-forth arguing with our parents, I couldn’t send my laptop up to Japan as well- only Casey could, because he had an important cyber commitment class or whatever to attend (I frankly never gave it much attention) – apparently, the coaches were strict about attendance and he was going to have to get up at 4 AM on some days of the trip so that he could attend the meetings, which might be considered child abuse by most kids his age. On top of all of the clothes and phones and laptops, we also got a phone charger and a battery bank for our phones just in case one of us used up all our phone batteries in the middle of the day- and I’m looking at you, Casey…
One last thing to take care of before we left – our terrarium, or whatever you could call it at this point. We’d made a terrarium about a month before now, and when I say that- I actually just mean putting dirt, moss, and animals into a depressing jar and then putting that depressing jar into a pool of water for cooling. How did it turn out? It was really quiet there- lately, we’d been seeing less animals on the surface, sometimes none at all, despite having put in thirty into the terrarium. There had been so much activity when we first began it; we had huge colonies of isopods chilling in every little hole and they were always doing something. We even had a whole weird lore story for the terrarium based on all the interesting animals we’d seen earlier, but we hadn’t done that anymore since it was quiet. Were they all dead? Were they, perhaps, escaped? We’d already caught a worm that had somehow managed to wiggle its way out of the jar and into the water around it. Maybe it was happening again, and somehow all of them had escaped- still, we didn’t see any visible signs of an escape.
I knew, of course, that there was still a possibility many of them were alive and were simply evading my detection. We wouldn’t be able to water them during the trip, and so it was decided to simply release them. The water outside didn’t help- it was merely meant to cool the system. We had no way of periodically watering it, so we were sure we had to let them go. Mere minutes before leaving, I went and grabbed the terrarium. After a moment, I turned it upside down above the ground and twenty pieces of dirt fell down immediately, and what I saw below it was crazy: all of them had survived and were merely hiding deep down below as far as I could see! A very tiny percentage of them had died, compared to the much higher numbers in our previous attempts at making terrariums. I’m still not entirely sure what it is we did this time that helped make the survival rate so high, but it certainly went well, and better than I anticipated.
With the terrarium now out of the way, we packed our bags and headed to the car, ready for the first trip of the vacation- an hour-long car drive up to Orange County to meet with Derek and get dinner for the night. We’d stay in the US for one more day at Derek’s house, before we would leave the next morning for LAX.
Driving to OC and Pho Thin
We left our house at exactly 4:45 PM on July 22nd, 2024, still excited about the terrarium’s success. Immediately after we left, I texted my friend to tell him about the terrarium, and our family talked for about five minutes before things got quiet. Everyone sort of just went on their phones in anticipation, while I looked at the view. Casey grinded geometry dash, a game he started getting back into recently and I mostly looked out the window and enjoyed the view. I guess everyone was just tired, but after a while it started to get a bit too quiet. Our mom decided to break the silence by playing our native Vietnamese music.
I didn’t really have a problem with that, being Vietnamese myself, but Casey is a little wild and had an agenda of his own. He wanted to hear his own music. If you’ve read VN2023, you know Casey is a little deranged and often can turn things interesting, and after this trip I can say he had no shortage of crazy activities here. You can probably already guess the type of music he’s into: a mix of rap and Gen Alpha Brainrot, which are all those songs about “Skibidi” and “Rizz” and all the other weird words that everyone says these days.
At first, he decided to start freestyle-rapping, coming up with crazy lines right on the spot. He’s already good at being a comedian through his words in general, so making a rap that had all of us laughing wasn’t too hard for him. I don’t remember everything about these raps, but he did talk a lot about some inside jokes in our SMP (I’d been playing Minecraft with Casey’s friends quite a bit recently. One kid got banned and Casey spent a lot of time laughing about it) as well as this other line which was pretty funny, “You get no girls, it’s not like I do either,” Which made everyone in the car laugh pretty hard.
My mom, however, was a bit irritated with this freestyling at times and tried to calm Casey down by asking him to be quiet so she could hear her own music. Our dad was also in agreement with this, as he enjoyed it too. Casey still wasn’t done yet, and he soon pulled out his phone to play his own, much louder music, probably with the goal of annoying everyone in the car. We were about an hour into the car ride when suddenly, I heard the very familiar voice from a year ago shout: “FOUR BIG GUYS.”
I instantly knew what was coming, because just about every immature kid in our generation knows and sings this song like it’s a holy hymn. Our parents didn’t really seem to immediately know what was coming. “YESSIR.” Casey, meanwhile, was very excited with this, as this song is one of his favorites.
“FOUR BIG GUYS-” Pandemonium broke out within the car. Everyone was basically trying to get Casey to stop, but obviously he wasn’t gonna do that immediately. We all started grabbing his phone as the loud music started to play, but he held it out of reaching, much to our annoyance.
“AND THEY GRAB ON MY THIGHS-” Casey was definitely enjoying this.
“BLOWING UP MY GUTS LIKE THE FOURTH OF JULY-” Obviously this wasn’t going to stop, so our parents started using their serious tone to get him to stop.
“IF THEY KEEP –” The threat seemed to have worked, and Casey lost his phone for the rest of the day. This was fine with the rest of us, since we were starting to get tired of being on the road and didn’t really want annoyance.
Speaking of getting tired, the road to Orange County was very congested that day- I’m talking about a three hour trip just to get to Little Saigon. Trips that could be done in 15 minutes on this journey took over an hour, and this partially contributed to Casey being an absolute wild animal on the car ride. Everyone was pretty frustrated, because by 7 PM we still weren’t at Derek’s house and it was agreed to just go straight to the Pho place Pho Thin for our first meal with Derek on the trip.
Once we got a little deeper into Orange County, the traffic became less of an issue when we finally got past the accident on the highway and went at a relatively normal pace for the rest of the trip. The sky was already getting darker and we knew by the time we arrived the sun would certainly have set. We arrived at the Pho place around 7:30 or 8 ish and met Derek in the parking lot, at the exact same place and restaurant we had eaten at back during UV2023. We quickly greeted Derek as well as his older brother Jason, who is already in college now. Then, we went inside and had our dinner. Most of our time was spent catching up on events that were going on in our life, talking about school and all that. It was mostly me and Derek talking- Casey and Jason were a lot quieter that first night. Adan also was supposed to come to the event as well, which would’ve been nice (remember him from Thailand?) but unfortunately he had something else he needed to do that day, I believe it was Boy Scouts that kept him from going. It sucked, but we always had his contact if we wanted to talk to him and could communicate as much as we wanted later on.
After this, we headed straight to Derek’s house, which was another somewhat long but more bearable distance from the Pho Place. The road was still somewhat crowded that day, but there was far less traffic involved. At about 8:30 PM ish, we arrived at Derek’s house, where we would be staying for the next half day before going to the airport for Japan.
Derek’s House
As soon as we arrived, all the kids (me, Casey, Derek, and Derek’s older brother Jason) all ran around to do our own thing, and by that 99% of the time it meant electronics. I helped a bit in carrying the luggage into the house. The rooms didn’t have much space for that, so we decided to hold all of our stuff just near the front door and make it easy to put in our taxi once we headed to the airport the next morning.
Casey and Derek ended up playing Minecraft on Derek’s computer, which Derek was fine with as long as Casey didn’t hack his account (I dunno, he just said that) and after that Casey went pretty nuts on his own thing. I saw a piano, which I had to use for a bit (being Asian) to show off, playing Liebestraume No. 3. I’d had a recital a few months earlier for this piece which I had barely memorized. Luckily I had it in by now, but there are still parts of it I need to work on.
One geography contest later (me against Derek to see who could name the most countries, which wasn’t even a contest…) and I decided to go to bed. It was already about 11PM by this point and after brushing my teeth, I feel asleep, although it did take a while. Casey and Derek stayed up for a bit longer, but eventually were forced to go to sleep. Casey and my dad slept outside, while my mom and I got a room to ourselves. Casey spent the rest of time (according to my parents) doing work for a cybersecurity class that was looming over him at the time. I wasn’t too worried about work for most of the trip, since I’d been grinding for the past months and was very confident in the upcoming school year. (As I write this, there’s two weeks left. Good luck, competition.)
Sleeping the first night was pretty hard, and in total I think I managed to get around only five hours at the maximum. I woke up at around 2AM because I kept thinking I heard an explosion- it was pretty common for me back then to wake up in the middle of the night, think there’s a killer clown or something, and then get scared and lose hours of sleep, especially in my elementary school years. I didn’t get scared because now I (somewhat) have an ability to just ignore that thought, but my mind was restless anyway probably due to excitement for the trip and I didn’t get back to sleep until around 4 (I actually have no clue when I fell asleep again. I couldn’t find the clock. It definitely felt like I was there for around two hours). I expected myself to completely crash and have to be waken up by my parents at 8:30AM that morning, but surprisingly I woke up shortly after at 5AM, and this time I was up for the day. Today was the day we headed for Japan, but before that everyone would need breakfast. Breakfast was banh mi, although now was a pretty inconvenient time to cook anything more substantial than cereal.
We would get our breakfast at Little Saigon again, where plenty of restaurants were open around 5AM. The whole place was full of activity way before the world woke up- it was also pretty light out, which surprised me because whenever I had gotten up at this hour, it was very dark. Casey and I both decided to tag along with our parents as they went to get breakfast that morning on Derek’s parent’s car for everyone in the house. Derek and Jason didn’t come, apparently asleep at that point. Later on, Derek revealed to us that he actually wasn’t asleep at that time and had been watching us prepare to leave in the shadows. He’d considered coming as well but for a reason that is still a mystery to me now decided against it.
The city was a lot more active at 5:30 in the morning than I thought it would be, especially the restaurants which had quite a few customers at the time when we went in to order banh mi. It wasn’t the extremely crowded place that might immediately come to mind since it was 5:30 and no one gets up at that time, but there was far more going on than you’d expect. The place was filled with Vietnamese shops and whatnot, but on the way back to Derek’s house I found an billboard for a website called iBuySD.com.
We’d seen ads for this company several times, which kept using the slogan of: “I’m from IBuySD.com, and I wanna buy your house!” As implied by the name, I’d initially thought that their real estate empire was limited to San Diego, but it seemed like now it was heading into Orange County and pretty soon we’d have an IBuyOC.com. In some situations, a deal with this company wouldn’t be a horrible idea, but the ads were still funny to watch. Casey and I didn’t do much at the restaurants besides sit there and check out the scenery.
We arrived back at the house at around 6 in the morning, and by that point Derek and Jason had both woken up and everyone was ready to start the day. We sat down with them to get breakfast in Derek’s kitchen and ate, which quickly filled our stomachs. We went back to brush our teeth and had about an hour more (about an hour) before we would be getting picked up by a taxi and heading straight to the LAX Airport to really begin the trip. Derek, Casey and I spent the rest of our time in the room that I had slept in the night before, talking about what we anticipated while Casey sat on his phone. He eventually pulled out an app in his phone that was supposed to simulate a whip and started “whacking” us with his phone, shouting, “GET BACK TO WORK!” Derek also had one of those in his phone, and the two started 1v1ing right before the car came.
Everyone immediately loaded their things, luggage, and themselves onto the huge black van that would take us on the hour left of traveling that we needed to get to the airport that night. Just before we left, Derek’s next-door neighbors, an older Filipino family, who wanted to “see them off” before they left, which started a brief conversation about everything that was going to happen during the trip. It’s nice that Derek has neighbors to say goodbye right before they leave, because it’s not something that happens to my knowledge in my neighborhood. We couldn’t stick around for long because the flight was still waiting, and immediately all of us began to load onto the car, with Derek’s family bidding farewell to their neighbors, who’s last words to them were “Eat lots of sushi!” before they retreated into their house and we all got on the car. This car consisted of three or four rows of seats, in which I sat in the back along with Casey and Derek. We left at 8:15 AM and began spamming low-quality images of any structures we saw on the road.
LAX
It took close to an hour to reach the airport, and in that time I’d already wasted half a gigabyte on pictures and videos somehow (It’s fine, I barely have any apps on my phone so I had plenty of space for the trip) because of how big Los Angeles is. We brought most things with us except our van which clearly wasn’t going to fit inside a luggage and would just awkwardly sit in Derek’s driveway for the next twelve days. There honestly wasn’t much worth taking a picture at as we were driving because a lot of them were just ordinary buildings, but once we got closer to the airport, they started to become more significant.
At one point, I made a joke about being “already at the airport!” just a few minutes after we left, but it clearly wasn’t big enough to be International and was actually a local airport, which I believe (speculating after map analysis) is most likely the Long Beach Airport.
By around 9:00 AM, I could tell we were nearing the airport. I could see a huge tower (ATC) and runway in the distance, as well as a huge and confusing complex of buildings that would really hurt my tiny brain to navigate through. The buildings we saw in the area also got more interesting, starting with this: The Los Angeles Times.
Next was apparently a building owned by Boeing, which I never was able to get a picture of (the only reason I know about this building now is due to the fact that my phone added the photo location as well) and then we began to enter the airport itself. The place is really complex and has hotels, different areas for different airlines, the whole thing’s really complicated. We came across a lot of stuff, some of which I have pictures for, which includes this sign with a bunch of airlines on it (I have no idea what I was thinking when I took that picture, I probably thought it was a terminal sign or something) as well as an underground tunnel that goes immediately below the runway, meaning while you’re down there it’s probably going to get loud from all the planes moving right above you. I actually recorded us as we drove under this tunnel, but nothing interesting really happened other than the fact that we, well, were right under the runway that we’d be taking off from soon.
Below are some pictures from our approach through the airport.
It took a long time to get through the seemingly endless labyrinth of roads and tunnels we needed to get through in order to reach our area, but we eventually figured out where we had to drop off and eventually headed to the area for checking in. After some trouble with the navigation, we found these electronic sign-in machines in which you could sign in yourself without having to interact with other human beings. Everyone got checked in and added their contact info as well as other details and then got ahold of boarding passes. This didn’t take too long, and after a bit we were about to get to the security part of the airport. Obviously there weren’t any pictures coming from that part of the airport, so we all just went through that like usual and met back up on the other side.
After coming through on the other side, I found a piano and played on it for a bit before we began to head through the endless halls of gates. It took some time, but we eventually found where our gate was, which was near the end of the hall (about as far as you could get from the security area.) We had come really early, and by the time we had found our gate it was only 10 AM. Our flight wasn’t scheduled to leave until 12, so we still had two hours left to kill before we could even get on the flight to kill even more time. We decided to sit down and set our stuff somewhere- we couldn’t do this near our gate since it was already filled to the brim with a million other families. We headed to another gate instead with a great view of a bunch of the nearby flights as well as a load of empty seats. Everyone took their seats and began to do their own thing. Derek’s parents had brought their computers here and were doing their work. Jason was on his phone, my mom went to use the restroom at some point and made me watch over everything and I don’t even know how Casey spent his time first. We came up with a multitude of ways to entertain ourselves and they were all pretty creative.
The first idea that I thought would be pretty funny was to send the details of the flight to a few close friends and have them track my location down on a website called flightradar24.com. I don’t really know how I came up with that idea, but for some reason it was pretty exciting, and with parents’ permissions, I was allowed to give it to a few trustworthy friends who had a strong passion for aviation. (Spoiler alert: It’s been 25 days or so since I left for the trip and I still haven’t gotten anything. Safe to say they didn’t check the radar.)
Next, we went ahead and starting watching planes move. Obviously, from our terrible view in the terminal we weren’t going to see much more than a plane moving out of the gate, but we were still excited anyway. We watched used our phones to record the planes leaving the gate (which was pretty lame, because they don’t go that fast on the ground before taking off.) Borrowing from my previous idea with the radar, I examined the surface of one of the planes just before that plane took off. I managed to find what I correctly predicted to be a plane identification code thing and I remembered the order of the letters and numbers long enough to put it in my phone and find it on flightradar24.com. While panicking over a bunch of planes moving at 3 mph, we also befriended a man in the airport who was also watching the planes, who said he was headed to Houston.
We then decided to start looking around the stores to see if we could find anything interesting. We quickly discovered that airport stuff is really expensive, such as this single pack of M&Ms, which was 12 dollars per pack, and these packs were only about the size of the palm of my hand. Who’s gonna take a crazy deal like that?
We had so much time that we were able to explore the entire section of the airport, which included several restaurants and shops with food items and whatnot. Casey, who came with us for a part of the adventure, split off at one of the stores because he quickly found things to beg our parents money to get.
We spent the last bit of our time using the restroom and also checking out the list of flights in LAX that day, which mostly included domestic flights (quite surprising, given that I’d think LAX is a more international thing) as well as international flights to Brussels, Mexico, Haneda Airport (Which is the airport in Tokyo we were headed to) as well as a bunch of other places that I couldn’t remember to save my life…
With that, it was time to finally board the plane. We met back up in the area we set our stuff down at and we finally prepared to get to the gate where our plane would be taking off, now in just 30 minutes. When we arrived, it turned out there still was a little time left, so we chilled out for a minute at a nearby seat before getting up when our boarding group was called. We put on masks for the time being just in case it was crowded, and I sent any last-minute text messages I needed to before we headed out on the trip. It didn’t take long for us to get through the line and before I knew it, we were already boarding the plane. Like most airlines, flight attendants were waiting at the entrance to welcome us into the plane. (Oh, in case you were wondering, we took United Airlines to get to Haneda Airport. We’d also be taking United to get back.)
“What’s up, cuh?” Casey replied. He had used his catchphrase, something which you’ll find in VN2023 as well. He said it quite frequently.
“What did he say?” One of the flight attendants questioned as soon as Casey left. (Yes, I heard the conversation)
“I heard, ‘what’s up,’ something…” Another one replied.
Before long, we sat down and had to directly address the issue of who would get the window seat. There was obviously quite an argument for it, particularly between me and Casey, because both of us enjoyed the window seat. I argued that Casey would probably be spending most of the flight watching movies or playing games or doing whatever you could do with your entertainment screen while I would actually spend time looking out the window. Casey didn’t budge and still really wanted the window seat. He told me that he could send the recording of the takeoff to me, but I wanted to try to take more than the takeoff. Last year’s flight over the Pacific Ocean had flown directly over Alaska. I had already run through the predictions and figured out that the entire flight, from California all the way to Japan would be lit with the sun, unlike the last flight, where we were constantly shrouded in darkness.
Speaking of the darkness, the windows behaved really weirdly. I was kind of annoyed that the windows had these mechanisms that would automatically dim them. You could turn them off and brighten the light outside to get a better view, but usually, that didn’t help much because the thing was programmed to dim again after a few seconds, which was really frustrating for me and Casey who were each eager to get pictures taken. The only way to keep it bright outside, as Casey, me, and Derek figured out, was to spam the “brighten” button so it wouldn’t dim on you.
We eventually both agreed that Casey would take the window seat of his own and I would sit in a seat behind him with my parents, and together we could still enjoy whatever views the plane had to offer. Casey sat next to Derek while I sat next to my mom, and we waited for the plane to begin taking off. We waited through the boring safety video (which had this animation playing of a marble which was pretty cool, actually) and after that we just waited the final 15 minutes before takeoff awkwardly trying to figure out when to start recording the video. The plane began to move down the runway, waiting for other planes to take off first and apparently also a lot of these vans and buses. A surprising amount of them were driving near the runway between terminals, which was quite surprising. Several of them ran next to us, and my brother, who was trying to commentate his video, decided to name of the buses “Jamal” before our plane started moving and we left Jamal behind. A moment later, we reunited with Jamal when he caught up to us and went ahead again. We analyzed the footage a bit later, and eventually realized that the bus we thought was Jamal the next time was actually different bus. Jamal was the first of many animals and inanimate objects that we would be randomly naming.
Finally, we turned onto the runway. The button issue still wasn’t fixed yet, despite me asking for help, so I decided to just spam the button while still recording. I didn’t feel entirely comfortable with this since we were about to take a roller coaster ride on a plane and I wouldn’t have any way to grip myself, but I was sure that it would be worth it. The plane turned down the runway, and began to take off.