Vancouver in 18 days

This is a brief itinerary of my 18 days in Vancouver, Canada. It is not packed with touristy stuff as I rather explore the city in a comfortable pace. I rented a room in the residential area and get to experience a Vancouverite lifestyle.

15 Jul (Wed)
- Vancouver International Airport
- Canada Line Skytrain Metro from YVR to King Edward station
- TransitLink bus #25 from King Edward station to Mountain View
- Stayed in Mountain View estate at the junction of King Edward/25th Ave & Fraser Street

16 Jul (Thu)
- Downtown Vancouver (Vancouver Public Library, Trump Vancouver, etc)
- Vancouver's Waterfront (Canada Place and Metro station)
- Lions Gate Bridge and Capilano (did not go in to see Suspension Bridge Park)
- Japadog (fusion of Japanese cuisine and hotdog bun)
- Gastown and the famous Steam Clock
- Lonsdale Quay Market and Seabus
- Vancouver's FareSaver Tickets (How to use + Where to buy)

17 Jul (Fri)
- Oakridge Centre (buy Telco Fido Sim Card)
- Science World / TELUS World of Science
- Skytrain Stadium/Chinatown station
- Skytrain Olympic Village station
- Skytrain Broadway - City hall station

18 Jul (Sat)
- JJ Bean Cafe (Fraser  Street and E 27th Ave)
- Fraser Street shops
- Grocery shopping at Dean's No Frills supermarket

19 Jul (Sun)
- Origin Church session at UBC
- University of British Columbia
- Anime Evolution 2015 in UBC Student Nest (a new student centre building)

20 Jul (Mon)
- Basil Pasta Bar at Downtown Vancouver (cheap and good design-your-own-pasta)
- Stanley Park (Prospect Point lookout and Ravine Trail to Beaver Lake)
- Stanley Park trolley (with Honduras driver guide)
- Stanley's Bar and Grill at the Pavilion
- Theatre Under the Stars Hairspray musical (only available in summer time)

21 Jul (Tue)
- University of British Columbia (bought a CAD 28 hoody at the bookstore)
- Beatty Biodiversity Museum
- Nitobe Memorial Garden
- Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
- Museum of Anthropology
- UBC Horticulture Greenhouse
- UBC Botanical Garden and Greenheart Canopy Walkway [should be Braveheart!]

22 Jul (Wed)
- TransitLink bus #33 from King Edward station to 16th Ave
- UBC Quidditch team practice at Carnarvon Park 

23 Jul (Thu)
- Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden
- Chinatown
- Richmond Centre at Richmond-Brighouse station

24 Jul (Fri)
- Aberdeen Centre
- Real Canadian Superstore
- Skytrain Lansdowne station

25 Jul (Sat)
- Jethro's Fine Grub at Fraser Street
- Vancouver City Hall
- Housewarming potluck party at Nicholas Manor
- Vanier Park to view Honda Celebration of Light at English Bay

26 Jul (Sun)
- Origin Church session at UBC
- Doug Mitchell Thunderbird Sports Centre (did not enter)
- UBC Wesbrook Village and Blenz Coffee
- Queen Elizabeth Park
- Bloedel Floral Conservatory (did not enter coz it is like visiting Singapore)

27 Jul (Mon)
- Granville Island Public Market
- The Vancouver Fish Company restaurant at Granville Island
- Island Park Walk and Fishermen's Wharf
- Museum of Vancouver and the Happy Show by Stefan Sagmeister
- H. R. Macmillan Space Centre and Planetarium theatre Star show
- Vancouver Maritime Museum and go on board the original ship St. Roch
- Explore shops at W 4th Ave

28 Jul (Tue)
- Fraser Street Indian Food
- Van Dusen Botanical Garden and guided tour
- Kerrisdale Modern City Chinese Restaurant and Dairy Queen

29 Jul (Wed)
- Vancouver Waterfront Station
- Hop on and off the stations along Millennium Line

30 - 31 Jul (Thu - Fri)
- Stayed in to rest coz down with flu

1 Aug (Sat)
- Chinatown
- Pacific Central Station
- Vancouver - Seattle border crossing

A mixture of Excitement and Fears

This post is written in the Changi Airport Terminal 3 Ambassador’s Transit Lounge while waiting to board the plane. Breakfast is simple porridge and lounge is half filled at 5am. Been wanting to visit these lounges for ages and finally manifested complimentary access vouchers in May.

Re-watched The Bucket List movie recently and reviewed my bucket list to-dos in North and South America. Since it may be my only trip to these 2 continents, I want to check off the must-dos during this trip. The purpose is to create memories here to remember by in old age.

Must-Do:

~ Play in Disney World in Florida and/or Disneyland in Los Angeles

~ Immerse in Wizarding World of Harry Potter in Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure

~ Stay at a beach in Hawaii

~ Fly over and/or set foot in the Amazon Rainforest

~ Explore NYC Central Park in Manhattan

~ Watch a Broadway Show in NYC

~ Visit Hollywood and/or Beverly Hills

~ Cruise around the Caribbean

~ Eat something from a Nutella Bar

~ Have a meal in NYC Central Perk Café

~ Take the 23andMe test

~ Dine (if got promo and budget then stay a night) at Trump hotel

Like-To-Do:

~ Visit more than 30 Gardens and National Parks

~ Visit more than 30 Science-related centres and museums

~ Take a photo with famous women, hopefully Ivanka Trump and Jessica Alba

~ Explore the Smithsonian Institution at Washington D.C.

~ Check out The International DOTA 2 Championship Secret Shop in Seattle

~ Walk on the Bolivia salt flats

~ Stay in the treehouse at Costa Rica

~ Visit Silicon Valley and Google Complex

~ See a Dinosaur Park that is less dangerous than Jurassic World

~ Enjoy a majestic waterfall (possibly Niagara Falls)

~ Catch a glimpse of Northern Lights

~ Go on Steve Jobs’s Venus iYacht if it is allowed and docked within North America

In June, I left a job I loved. The inspiration to quit came when a crazy customer yelled at me “GET OUT OF HERE!” at work. She threatened to sue me and wrote to my CEO and bosses to get me fired for being rude. To remember the incident, I submitted the letter on the same date a year later.

In May, my ex-boyfriend of 25-months realised he did not love me wholeheartedly and thought our personalities are not compatible. So we decided to enjoy our last month together and part amiably as friends. Although I feel sad and disappointed, I am grateful for his love and wish him the best.

Had a couple of health scares in the last few years to remind me on life’s fragility. Dying is not scary, but not living fully is. Everyday alive has been a blessing, I just want to live a little longer than my parents so they never need to live with losing their daughter.

At this cross-junction in life, I feel fearful of the uncertainties, but excited by the possibilities. Since 30s is the new 20s, life gets better now that we are mature enough to know what we want, have a bit more wisdom on how to get them and still young enough to give new experiences a try.

Wanted to go on a 1-year round-the-world trip but travel insurance in Singapore covers 182 days max and different zones. The international coverage per annum costs more than SGD3000 and claims are too complicated as the company is based overseas.

Bought a one-way ticket on Monday afternoon to see where life takes me. Prepared a small budget for this trip and brought sleeping bag for camping in airports (like Tom Hanks in The Terminal). The challenge of this trip is to get out of comfort zone and become more resourceful.

One check-in rolley luggage and one carry-on backpack with a total of 28kg. Since will be on the move, it is better to travel as light as possible. Not sure what type of terrain and all, preferably no need to covert the versatile rolley luggage to backpack.

Realised I dropped the MiBand during check-in, but found it lying on roadside 20minutes later. Super impressed with XiaoMi now coz it had tyre marks on the band but still works! Felt sad about the loss at first, now it felt like signs of miracles.

  

For the first time ever, I finally have no work, no debts, no liabilities, no commitments, a little savings, fair bit of energy, and a lot of time. Although I somewhat planned for this 12 years ago, the stars must have aligned for this fortunate situation.

What is the worst that can happen? Run out of cash, shorten the trip, come back to Singapore and get a job again. Or find out I am terminally ill with not much time left to live. Since ‘You Only Live Once’, might as well take the road less travelled if that is the way to live authentically.

We are taught to pursue money for experiences/things and freedom of options/choices, but what we really want are access to nice things and control in our life.

The 30-Something Burn-Out

Society and culture conditioned us what success means and how many 30-somethings appeared to be successful. Social media painted the positive highlights in the lives of our friends, public figures and even ourselves. It is an onset of an underlying problem when our Social Media life appears to be more exciting, instead of the reflection, of our actual life.

Christina Maslach conceptualised burn-out as emotional exhaustion, dehumanization and diminished personal accomplishment. While this provide a superficial explanation with in-depth psychological reasoning, the issues with burn-out continued, if not worsen, in this decade as compared to the last century.

If fatigue and lethargy are the early symptoms of burn-out, insomnia and panic attacks may be the mid-term symptoms. Education trained us to spot problems and find solutions. We know when we are reaching the tipping point, but we also need to recognise that instead of just pressing on, taking a step back can also help.

According to Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, the key focus in our 30s is love and care – intimacy versus isolation and generativity versus stagnation. While it is possible to skip stages, the incomplete earlier life stages can affect us at this time, when our lives are going on full force with insufficient physical and emotional support.

More research are being done on children, adolescents and elderly, as opposed to adults. As 30-somethings, we should be able to manage our lives properly, and when we cannot, there is something wrong with us. Hence, for some of us who have difficulties coping in some aspects, we get classified in ‘emerging adulthood’ because we ‘failed to launch’.

When our decisions and actions are aligned to our core being, we feel at peace. But in our daily lives, there are many choices and actions we need to do that may not align to what we really want to do. And when it happens over a period of time, it slowly eats into our mental and emotional well-being.

While ‘comparisonitis’ is a recent term and most of us are aware of the pitfalls, sometimes the influence is subtle and from sources which are not blindingly obvious. “Keeping up with the Joneses” is reflected everywhere, from subliminal advertising messages, to in-your-face consumer products.

The availability of financial resources affects our quality of life, which is very prevalent in the Singapore culture. People get into debts in order to buy the items we think can improve our lives, without realising it actually creates a downward spiral. After some time, then we realised that we are trapped in the rat race of making more money to sustain this lifestyle.

For Singaporeans, it appears we have fulfilled the lower levels of Maslow’s hierarchy for physiological and safety needs. Our environment may not be able to fulfil our need for love and belonging, and esteem. And at the same time, we were taught to pursue self-actualisation and self-transcendence.

As 30-something, we need to juggle a multifaceted life, with new challenges daily from relationships, work and personal development. On top of that, most of us had multiple roles to fulfil – spouse/partner, son/daughter, mother/father, friend, relative, colleague, boss, employee, business associate, neighbour, mentor, guardian, etc.

Robin Dunbar hypothesised that a human cognitive has a limit to 150 stable social relationships at any one time. While there are other anthropologists who proposed the numbers between 231 and 290, having too many superficial connections may be more exhausting than maintaining a few deeper emotional connections.

Personality-related causes of burnout are harder to treat as it is caused by psychological issues during our childhood development. Psychotherapies like Lifespan Integration may help to ease the workaholic, perfectionist, or narcissistic part in us. But it requires our humility and vulnerability to let the therapy work since no one wants to be a defective person.

Google the word ‘burnout’ and there are 112 million pages on this topic, with 12 million pages on symptoms and 14 million pages to prevent it. With so many strategies and advice, as well as offers for help, why are we still plaque with this growing epidemic among the younger generations?

The most common solutions for occupational burnout are leaving the current job, changing career and taking a sabbatical/break to recuperate. These short term solutions are usually effective when burnout is caused by external factors like the job, co-workers, clients, etc. It boils down to our individual coping mechanism that we developed since childhood.

While we can detect that we are overwhelmed with burnout symptoms, most of us may not realise the detrimental effects until it is too late – e.g. breakdown of relationships or development of illnesses. It eats into our mind bit-by-bit day-by-day, and it can go unnoticed for years as there is no-one-size-fits-all eruption.

Perhaps the way to combat burnout is to learn from the Bhutanese, think about death daily and accept all our emotions. In this way, our brain will subconsciously refocus on positive thoughts. When we know death is coming, the most important things in our life supersede all unimportant problems.

There are research on how meditation may be an effective treatment for burnout and mental disorders with and without the aid of medication. Some has doubts on this low cost and low intensive treatment, while others find it too time-consuming without instantaneous results. For someone who is already burnt-out, it can be difficult to quieten the mind as a start.

Psychological resilience research is ongoing and may be a link to negating burn-out in young adults. The earlier generations been through tough environment conditions made them more resilient than the younger generation. While resiliency cannot be taught as a subject, it is like a muscle – the more we use the resilient muscle, the stronger it becomes.

As there are no diagnostic tests to determine whether one is experiencing burnout or a short burst of overwhelm, it may be easier to put it as a clinical case of depression instead. Although it is not measurable from a scientific standpoint currently, it does not make this mental problem any less significant.

Based on the generic fight, flight or freeze mode, some eat comfort food, go for a shopping spree, take a holiday or spend time with loved ones as methods to cope with life crisis. Even when we fully recover from the first burn-out, we are not immune and likely will experience again throughout adulthood.

After living for 30-something years, there are parts of us that we love, some parts need improvement, and other parts we rather not have. Burn-out happens where we keep trying to improve (e.g. make more money) and hide our ugly side from others (e.g. positive highlights on social media), we forget to focus on the strengths and positive parts we love.

Like most wounds, time is necessary in the healing. Whether it is time off from work, me-time away from others, or rest time to recuperate, having this space to relax and reflect is essential to recover from burnout. In our 30s, when we have commitments, family and responsibilities, time becomes a luxury that not everyone can afford.