In Japan, SPF50+ is everywhere and comes in a variety of formulas and price ranges. I brought home a few different kinds so I could Google translate the bottles at leisure and also do Science and maybe create the information I wanted when trying to figure out the difference in each formula. So! Warning: flesh ahead. Also, note that I am a different colour than you.
Biore sells three readily-available formulas for a face-friendly SPF50+ face goo, all around $8-12 each:
Biore UV Aqua Rich Watery Essence
Biore UV Aqua Rich Aqua Protect Lotion
Biore UV Aqua Rich Aqua Protect Mist
okay but like what does that mean
Biore UV Aqua Rich Watery Essence is a thick lotion. I used it on my face because why not.
Biore UV Aqua Rich Aqua Protect Lotion is a milky lotion weirdly reminiscent of calamine lotion. Very runny and seemed to dry out a little but dispersed into my skin well enough.
Biore UV Aqua Rich Aqua Protect Mist is a fine, clear mist. I wish I bought more of this kind; it’s great to have in the car. Ultimately I brought it inside to use as a final setting spray for hair and face before heading outside, them UVs be nasty.
The last gratuitous shot of my chicken leg is all three lotions rubbed in and before my current bake in the sun. Will add results this evening. Science!
Places we visited that I can actually spell and pronounce: Reykjavik, Skálholt, Vik, Höfn
The rest of the places we visited, courtesy of the itinerary: Kirkjubæjarklaustur, Egilsstaðir, Seyðisfjörður, Skútustaðahreppur, Hofsstaðir, Arnarstapi, plus others I’m forgetting
Favourite restaurants: Magma Hotel Bistro, Salka Valka in Reykjavik (the Mamma Mia pizza was amazing, had it two days in a row), Fish and Chips Lake Mývatn, Bastard Brew & Food in Reykjavik, Sveitasetrin at the Hofsstaður Guesthouse
Best hotel breakfast: Fosshótel Mývatn (Kimli), Sel Guesthouse (Ed)
Waterfalls seen: 71042
Trips to the tomato soup and homemade bread buffet that one guy made in Friðheimar: 8
Pieces of hákarl consumed (total): 5 6 (I had 2, Ed had 4 for some reason)
Amount of Diet Coke smuggled into the country: 3.5L
Geysers seen making a statement about ejaculation: 5
Favourite portions of the country: Southeast and East Iceland
Puffins seen: 0 :(
Northern Lights seen: 0
Incidents of an unfortunate nature: The jetlag hit me really hard when we landed and it took 4 days to get over the extreme exhaustion and generic crud, several (new) pairs of underwear I brought were the incorrect size
“Hidden” gems: The scenery between and Egilsstaðir and Seyðisfjörður was incredible, the GoT oral sex cave made my heart hurt, the magic cave
Unexpected bonus: a Flying Tiger store down the street from our hotel in Reykjavik (!!!!!)
Icelandic hot dogs eaten: 2, by Ed
Biggest expense outside the trip itself: Food
If we did it all over again, what I’d change: fewer days in Reykjavik (we had 5 total which was about 2 days too long)
Number of hours we missed the country-stopping storm by: 6 or so, we got incredibly lucky
Job offers received while away: 1
Anniversary celebrated: the 20 Slash 25
Scariest moment: I almost tossed coins into what turned out to be a fertility fountain to wish for babies O_O
Amount of fun we had: too many to count
I’m gonna be processing this trip for a long time. It was .. spectacular.
I did call Expedia yesterday to see if I could use the credit. I had a direct flight to London Heathrow picked out for late April on Lufthansa that was well under my original ticket price, so I called up the special hotline for wieners with travel credit and tried to set everything in motion.
I failed, though. Apparently Expedia DOES check with the airline to see if the credit is valid, and Lufthansa came back saying I had already been issued a refund. There was something fucky going on with the site too, as my faux-credit showed a “must use” date of November 2020 when it had been showing as end of August 2021 up until the day I made the phone call. Alas, someone on Lufthansa’s end is maintaining that database of flight credits REALLY well, and as it turns out, I don’t actually have the credit that appears on my Expedia account.
No free trip for me. I think I confused the hell out of the poor woman at Expedia, because when she said I had been issued a refund, she swore up and down I would get it in the mail soon. I thanked her for her time and for checking for me, but I think she was waiting for me to flip out on her. I can’t imagine most people, when seeing they have a credit on their account, would just go away after being told it was in error, but .. well, I already received the refund (twice). I knew she was right, and I wasn’t going to try and push the issue any more than I already had. I mean, I picked up a PHONE and DIALLED a NUMBER and frankly that was enough social interaction for at least a week.
Definitely not the end of the world. I saw it through to a resolution, and while it wasn’t the ideal outcome*, I can’t be sad about it.
*: I’m pretending that the “ideal outcome” would have been a free trip, but let’s face it: had the credit actually worked, I’d just get shiny new anxiety about a thousand other things, up to and including imagining some sort of Final Destination scenario had I actually gotten on the plane. Frankly, this is for the best. I can book my own damn trip, with blackjack, and hookers. In fact, forget the trip.
Fingers crossed the world gets unfucked between now and September, because I really really REALLY want to go to New York.
My anxiety is really superstitious. If I don’t complete the rituals involved in dozens of insignificant acts, the world will end and it will all be my fault. I don’t have time for that kind of existential crisis, so I cross my fingers and throw salt over my shoulder and never give my bad thoughts voice or they’ll come true and that would really suck. No ladders or broken mirrors or umbrellas opened indoors. Can’t hang a new calendar early, or even change the page – mostly because that would be really confusing, but also bad things will happen apparently so I just avoid it altogether. No need to invite the bad times, right? And there’s lots of wood around to knock on, so we should be okay.
My superstitions go hand in hand with the idea of karma. It’s generally pretty easy to avoid being a bad person, but somewhere in the back of my mind I worry that the point system is real and any time I’ve accidentally littered I get negative points and that’s why I don’t know math. It’s stressful and it makes me have internal debates about doing things that are beyond inconsequential, but WHAT IF. I swear I’m not indecisive, I’m just weighing the contents of my soul so if you could just give me a minute here, everything will be fine.
All of this is to say that I have an ethical problem of my own making, and I’m not sure what to do about it: Is it “bad” if I take an opportunity I did not earn?
Before I explain fully, here are some pertinent facts:
This is not a tangible object
If I don’t follow through, it ceases to exist
No one will miss out on anything if I take it OR if I don’t
No one will lose any money if I take it OR if I don’t
The odds of getting “caught” are almost non-existent
Taking the opportunity (or not taking it) will affect zero people other than myself
.. but I didn’t earn the opportunity, nor did I pay for it. It’s not mine, but it could be if I took it. So, do I take it?
I was supposed to go to Prague in April of 2020. That didn’t happen for obvious reasons, and I was given a flight credit from the airline. To use the credit, I have to book a flight before the end of this month for travel before the end of July 2022. If I don’t use the credit, it simply disappears. I can’t transfer it to anyone, or use it for anyone other than myself.
No brainer, right? Use the credit, book a flight, maybe go somewhere next year.
This is me, and nothing is ever that simple. The problem? I received a refund for that flight.
.. twice.
Prior to my flight, all airlines and agencies were telling customers to “go through your bank” to deal with pandemic-cancelled trips in the hopes your credit card company could come through for you. It took several hours on hold with a bunch of different companies, but eventually my bank did reverse the charge for the flight. The money came with a warning: the airline is given an opportunity to fight the charge reversal, and if that happens, the bank would claw that money back until a resolution is worked out. I left the money where it was, but no one ever came for it and whatever statute of limitations the bank put on that refund has long since passed.
I didn’t know that would happen, though, so I also submitted a claim against my travel insurance. I didn’t think anything would happen there, because in the ten years since I became an International Kimli of Mystery, not once has travel insurance ever worked out in my favour. Not even for our Super Typhoon’d trip to Japan that we didn’t take in 2019, for loophole reasons. I guess “global pandemic” isn’t something the insurance companies wanted to deal with, so they processed my claim and cut me a cheque.
Because of my aforementioned anxiety around karma, I actually tried to return the funds. I called the bank multiple times, but could never get through to anyone to explain the situation and eventually I stopped trying. I think I reasoned with myself that by waiting on hold for longer than I waited to get the charge reversal the first time around, I had done my due diligence in trying to do the “right” thing. I forgot about the duelling refunds after that, because I had so much going on in my life at the time. So busy. Jam-packed life of action.
Time rolled onwards, and it’s now the summer of 2021. Ed and I have both received all vaccines, and things are starting to look positive for the first time in almost two years. I logged into my favourite booking site to do some wishful thinking when I saw a button that said “Check your credits”. I did, and wtf: I have a credit with an airline. For a flight I’ve already been refunded for, twice.
Now what?
I could book a flight, of course, but would it be “wrong” of me to do so? And if so, by who’s standards? If I had to choose an entity that would suffer from my deceit, I suppose it would be the airline – but at the end of the day, do I really care about an airline’s bottom line? No. Fuck ’em. If they didn’t screw me, they’d screw someone else.
So that’s what I’m wrestling with. What would you do if you were me? As I see it, my options are basically:
Try to book a flight. What’s the worst that could happen? By next summer, the Kappa Beta Phi variant will limit our freedom anyway, so I’ll probably just end up with another credit and have the same non-problem.
Ignore the credit. I’ve already been given my just desserts, and I had seconds. Taking more would just be greedy.
Each of the refunds I’ve been given for the cancelled Prague trip come from different corporations – the bank, the travel insurance company, and now the airline. No one is going to hold a meeting with the other companies to find out if anyone has been double or triple-dipping during the pandemic confusion, so if I DO try to use the credit – strictly for science, obviously – no one loses out, the airline would just re-sell the seat. If I don’t take it, the only person who loses out is me. I really do hate losing out, but .. karma.
What’s stronger: my need to see this through just to see if I can, or my anxiety?
It’s not the road trip to Edmonton that we’ve been trying to take since 2017 and have been foiled each time by the planet (smoke from fires, landslides, unseasonable winter conditions, COVID, radioactive Q-supporting yeti, etc), although that is tentatively penciled in for August – no, we have a Actual Trip planned.
We’re going* to New York in September.
Folks, I am basically beside myself with excitement. Not because we get to fly somewhere, not because we get quality time with excellent friends we haven’t seen in 18 months, not because it’s somewhere other than my beloved balcony – no, I am super fucking extra bouncy excited because of EATING.
Fuck my complicated fat girl relationship with food, I am 100% going to eat my way through New York the entire time we’re there and oh my god I cannot wait. Yeah, we have some non-food related plans while we’re there – there’s a Kusama exhibit I’ve been dying to see, and I really want to go to Coney Island and ride the Wonder Wheel again – but the rest of the time? We will be walking and eating and wearing masks and eating and also there will be a lot of eating and Diet Coke from Chipotle because fuck Chick-fil-A forever.
We get in on Friday night and my plans involve taking off my pants and ordering Chinese food (or as my people call it, “food”). That’s it. No pants and white rice all night long.
The last time we were in NYC was November 2019 as a consolation prize for that whole “no-Japan-because-Super-Typhoon” thing, and it was the first time we’d ever had Chinese food in New York. It was fucking incredible – like, I was very sad that I was full. It was probably the best Chinese food I’d ever eaten – suddenly, all the sitcoms talking about Chinese food in New York made sense. I’ve been patiently waiting for our triumphant return to the city so I can eat all the food I didn’t eat during the pandemic, and I cannot fucking wait. I don’t even feel guilty about how much I’m looking forward to food in New York, that’s how excited I am.
Everything is paid for and planned, but the actual “going” part is the only question mark at the moment. The border between US and Canada isn’t open yet, but it’s actually always been open for flights – we just can’t drive there (and I really want to). Only remaining complication is the America’s refusal to acknowledge the Astra-Zenica vaccine as valid, and unfortunately that’s the one most Canadians have – Ed’s rocking a half AZ, half Moderna life, whereas I’m a Pfizer baby through and through. Will it be resolved before we go? We’re more than two months out, so while it’s obviously time to start packing, we don’t know what’s going to happen. As of Tuesday, double-vaxxed Americans can come to Canada, but we can’t go down there until at least August 21st – and there’s no guarantee that this’ll be worked out before then. Hell, Québec is even offering AZ-vaxxed folks the opportunity to get a THIRD shot so they’ll be allowed to cross the “No AZ” border. Not entirely sure why a third untested shot has more protection than the proven-everywhere-except-the-US AZ shot has, but .. well, America. Nothing makes sense there, including why the Chinese food is so good in New York. Is it drugs? I hope it’s drugs.
I’m probably getting ahead of myself here, but I’m also trying to book .. something. I don’t know where or when, but something. I have a large credit with Lufthansa that has to be booked before the end of August, and used before the end of July 22 .. but where do I want to go? Will MWC happen next year? Would Ed even get to go to it if it does? Or should I just throw all these unknowns in the trash and book a comforting and long-overdue trip to London? The UK is terrifying right now, but surely it’ll be better before next July .. won’t it? I don’t know. I hate not knowing.
Outside of that, I do believe I have encountered a first for all of mankind: I have received not one but TWO refunds for my COVID-canceled Prague trip.
Like, what.
When I booked the trip (in November of 2019), I was still living in a happy bubble in which travel insurance wasn’t a useless and frustrating option; still holding out hope that we’d be refunded for our Super Typhoon-canceled Japan trip (we weren’t). Since that time I’ve come to realize that travel insurance is simply a waste of money that could be better spent on literally anything else, but since I had purchased the insurance for Prague, I thought I’d go through the motions of making a claim because let’s face it I have nothing but time these days.
I submitted a half-hearted insurance claim with the info I had. Logically, I qualified for coverage: trip cancelled through no fault of my own, complete with documentation. However, logic rarely has anything to do with insurance claims, so I was fully expecting my claim to be denied because COVID was outside the purposefully-vague policy conditions. I quickly forgot about my claim, going so far as needing to be prompted twice by the insurance company to send in any corroborating information. I did and heard nothing, which is what I expected.
In the meantime, I was able to cancel the hotel and excursion bookings with no issue, and received prompt refunds for the bookings. The airline, though, decided that people shouldn’t get money back: instead, they would give people credit for their cancelled flights; credit that expires at the end of August. And has to be used for travel before the end of 2020. Thumbs up, Lufthansa – the world will absolutely be recovered from the apocalypse by August. What excellent business sense you have!
I have lost literally thousands of dollars in the last 8 months because of fucked up travel circumstances out of my control, and this was just one more feather in the ugliest cap that ever did exist. Fed up, I contacted my bank and started the chargeback process. It took several hours to get through, but I was eventually able to talk to an actual human who got the process rolling for me. All that was left to do was sit back, play some more Animal Crossing, and wait for the airline to inevitably deny my claim and claw the money back.
True to the bank’s word, the initial cost of my flight was applied back to my credit card approximately two weeks later. This is a temporary thing – the bank has to give the airline time to review my request, and nine point nine times out of ten, they deny the chargeback. Once that happens, the bank will take the full cost of my flight back out of my credit card. To make sure I had the funds to cover this, I put the “refund” into a separate account so I could throw it back on the Visa when Lufthansa played their dirty game.
The clawback hasn’t happened yet, and the money is still sitting in my Swiss bank account for untraceable money crimes. While it would be awfully nice if the airline decided to stop fucking people over, I realize they probably can’t and many airlines will go bankrupt due to the apocalypse. Sucks, but not my problem or responsibility, so I feel no guilt at demanding my money back. There is a nation-wide fuck shortage, and I don’t have enough extra fucks to generate pity for giant corporations receiving government bailouts.
So, here we sit: refund (temporarily) received from Visa. It could be months before the airline is able to wade through the thousands of chargeback requests they’re getting and deny them all.
Then, last week: a cheque arrived from the insurance company for the full amount of my flight. My claim had been paid in full.
What the fuuuuuuck!
I deposited the cheque (into a different offshore banking account; I really do commit a lot of money crimes) and sat on the situation over the long weekend. At present, I am on hold with my bank (going into hour 2) to get them to reverse my chargeback claim. As fun as it would be to keep both refunds and go on some sort of spree, I really don’t want this to come back and bite me in the ass down the road when I might be less able to pay back an ill-gotten $1500. Is this what being a reasonable adult is like? Frankly, I’m not a fan.
The RBC hold music is driving me batty, and I’m rapidly running out of patience to sit here much longer. From what I remember, it took well over two hours for my initial call to be answered, so I’ll reluctantly give it a bit more time – beyond that, though, how much effort am I required to put in to Do the Right Thing? I’m pretty confident that Lufthansa is going to claw this money back any day now, but I was also pretty confident that the insurance company would deny my claim because I wore mismatched socks that one time in 5th grade, so I’m not holding much faith in my intuition these days. If I can’t get through to the bank (aka give up on this fucking awful hold music), can I just sit on the money until I hear .. anything? Banking is still stuck somewhere in the 19th century, so there’s no online option for me to go through to deal with this (and I somehow doubt “take back this money” would be something they’ve built an interface for) – I have to use my Mouth Words and talk to an Actual Human, which is among my least favourite things to do.
When they come to throw me in jail in 2023 because of this money I’ve stolen through no real effort, at least I can say I TRIED to do the right thing. That’ll count when I’m begging for leniency, right? I’m way too awkward to go to jail, and too much of a shit disturber – I’ll form gangs. Weird ones. No one wants to deal with my weird prison gangs, trust me.
Yesterday I experienced my first thunder storm in Animal Crossing, so that was fun. How’s everyone else holding up?
After 4 years of trying, we’ve finally earned the right to display the Amsterdam travel poster on our kitchen wall. Success!
Ed and I spent 5 days in Amsterdam and 3 days in Haarlem with Excellent Friends and it was so fun. Cold, but fun. We’d actually spent the three previous years in countries much souther than the Netherlands, and so were somewhat unprepared for the horrors of a Dutch winter – the rain we could handle, but the wind and boner-killing COLD of it all was truly dazzling in the worst possible way. It seems that traveling to exciting new places and purchasing emergency climate-appropriate clothing is rapidly becoming a thing for us – we happened upon a Dutch clothing store (hilariously called America Today) selling delightfully warm and waterproof jackets, and the four of us gleefully bundled up to stave off the misery.
The weather wasn’t all bad while we were there – we did have two or three glorious days, which were appreciated that much more when they came around. I can only imagine that the Netherlands are fucking magical when it’s not winter, because even with the wind and rain it was pretty damn excellent. I would definitely go again. Maybe not in February, but again.
It’s been a while, but let’s see if I can remember how to do this.
Amsterdam in Numbers
Dutch pancakes eaten: 14
Bottles of Diet Coke smuggled into the country: 11; they lasted 6 days
Epiphanies about Van Gogh: 1 (in addition to the mental illness, he had some problematic views about the “peasants” he so admired)
Cafes visited by me: 0. Funny thing about Amsterdam’s drug culture: it’s not as good as Seattle or Vancouver. I have zero interest in mushrooms, but thought about visiting a cafe or two because when in Rome and all that. Thing is, all their joints are spliffs – a mixture of pot and tobacco. I may fill my body with chemicals and have highly questionable habits, but I draw the line at tobacco – it’s super fucking gross and makes me cough and stink and sad. Plus, I’m WAY too cool to look like a common tourist so I just didn’t bother.
Red Light District visits: 3
Stairs climbed to get to our amazing hotel room in Haarlem: 56, several times a day ow
Gallons of freshly squeezed orange juice enjoyed: 4
I don’t know, and it’s driving me batty. All travel planning is on hold until Covid-19 shows itself out. I’m sure my upcoming posts will be less coherent the longer my cabin fever (and hopefully not real fever) goes on.
It was decided that the post-Barcelona trip this year would be to Amsterdam. When it came time to book the flights, there was no way for me to get Ed from Vancouver to Barcelona, then Amsterdam, then back to Vancouver without enduring any hellacious 16-hour layovers. I tried different configurations for over a month and even tried using a travel agent, but came up with nothing. To get around this, I booked Ed on two flights, four legs total:
Vancouver to Amsterdam, leaving before the conference and returning after vacation (KLM outgoing, Delta return)
Amsterdam to Barcelona, leaving several hours after landing in Amsterdam and returning after the conference (KLM outgoing, Iberia return)
The plan was for Ed to rub elbows in Barcelona while I cleaned up cat pee, then I would join him in Amsterdam a week later. His BCN-AMS flight would have landed two hours after my YVR-AMS flight, at which point we would purchase some wooden clogs and find some tulips to tiptoe through.
Unfortunately, germs happened. GMSA cancelled the Mobile World Congress entirely last week. It’s the biggest mobile conference in the world, so thousands of people are scrambling and trying to recoup flight and hotel costs. Luckily, I had purchased insurance for both of Ed’s flights, so everything should be fine!
Narrator: Things were not fine.
I dealt with the inner two legs first, and tried to cancel AMS-BCN. I managed to get a refund for the KLM portion, but the Iberia leg does not allow any changes. I have to go through insurance if I want the rest refunded. Insurance has already told me that a worldwide pandemic is not a valid reason to refund flight costs, so while I can go through the super fun experience of submitting a claim, there’s approximately 0.2% chance of it being successful.
Next up was the YVR-AMS flight. I wanted to change Ed’s outgoing flight from 02/21 to 02/27, but KLM basically laughed at me and told me to get bent: the flight is 100% non-changeable and non-refundable. Adding a dash of fun and complication was the fact that I had purchased an upgrade for Ed, from basic economy to economy plus, which allowed him checked luggage and a much better seat. KLM happily took my money for this, but input the change as a seat change only because technically upgrading the cabin was a change, which was not allowed. They never told me this, just said yep here’s your receipt and your new seat and see you later. Cool.
So, I can’t make any changes to the KLM flight whatsoever. Ed’s return flight from Amsterdam was still fine – I was on the same flight, just on a different ticket entirely – so I booked him a one-way ticket from YVR-AMS, leaving on the 27th with me. Hooray!
Narrator: Things were not hooray.
There’s no reason for Ed to be in Amsterdam/Barcelona a week early, so he missed his original outgoing flight (scheduled for today). Unfortunately, when you miss one flight, the rest of your flights get cancelled – so I got a lovely email late this afternoon saying Ed no longer had a return flight on 03/07.
I called up Expedia, who basically told me we were fucked. Ed called Delta, who said the same thing. They’d be willing to reinstate Ed’s return ticket if we paid the difference for a new ticket, which currently costs $4800.
At this point, we’ve paid for a return flight to Amsterdam (Ed), a second return flight to Amsterdam (me), and a one-way ticket to Amsterdam (Ed) for a total spend of about $5k, which doesn’t include hotels and red-light visits. I’ve been working on this trip since October, throwing myself into planning two days after the Japan trip didn’t happen as a way to distract myself from the overwhelming disappointment of our ruined, non-refundable, insurance-doesn’t-cover-super-typhoons trip.
I feel so stupid. I should have realized that simply not showing up to one flight would render the rest of ticket void, but I’ve been so stressed out trying to unravel this mess that I just .. didn’t. It doesn’t help that my ego is sporting some serious bruises, because I enjoyed almost a full decade of extreme luck when booking trips, only for everything to have been 17 different flavours of bad since our first truncated trip in 2018. I’m also 100% done purchasing travel insurance, because this is the third time my trip has been fucked through no fault of my own but the policy (with Allianz, Aetna, and now AIG) hasn’t covered fuck all.
I was on the phone for two hours this afternoon, and we actually have a resolution: Expedia changed Ed’s one-way YVR-AMS flight to a return trip with the exact flights we want, AND they covered the cost of the change (best case scenario would have been $401). I was willing to pay the extra $400 to make the flight work because we were in too deep to back out now (and I don’t want to) and $400 was easier to swallow than $4800, but I’m so so so glad the supervisor I spoke with (I had to go full Karen and ask for a manager after the first agent wasn’t able to help me) went to bat with corporate for me. I’m exhausted and hate the phone and am thinking about breeding complicated dogs as a hobby instead of travel, but as of right now, things are good and it didn’t cost me thousands more to fix and holy fuck do I ever need this fucking vacation.
I have had more metaphorical waffles in the last three days than I’ve ever had in my life. Here are some of the things I am waffling between like it’s a goddamn sport:
I’m totally fine with being at home!
No wait, I am filled with angst and sadness!
Let’s go to Vegas for a few days to keep ourselves entertained!
Vegas is not Japan and I don’t gamble or drink so wtf why Vegas!
We can rebook the trip for next month!
It’ll be a rushed, truncated version of our original trip and that will not be as satisfying!
New York?
New York!
But I would have had New York ANYWAY, so I’m still missing out!
Did we make the right decision in cancelling?
Everyone else is going ahead with their Japan plans!
The pictures of all the flooding look awful, and a lot of infrastructure is still shut down
But I am so miserable being at home!
.. and so on, and so forth. No new developments on the Refund Saga, but a thousand piecemeal suggestions have come and gone in the last three days. I keep changing my mind. Yesterday, I wanted to go to Vegas. Later that evening, Operation New York was a go. This morning, I wanted to make late November work for a shorter Japan trip. After doing the dishes, I decided on requesting a compromise for travel in 2020. I’d like to say my last (excellent) suggestion is the best one and will definitely be what we do going forward, but I’d said that at least half a dozen times in the last 72 hours. I no longer know what the fuck, because the fuck keeps changing. I am a soggy, gluten-free waffle made out of quinoa and squash. I am a poor approximation of food.
We do have plans to go to New York in early November. It was going to be a working trip – fly in, work during the day, then explore at night like Tourist Batman. One suggestion I had early on was to instead take time off while we’re in NY, making it a real trip instead of one where we work out of someone else’s house for a few days so we don’t use up vacation time. This is actually a really good idea, and one we’re probably going to go ahead with. New York is a fun city, we’d get to have some daytime adventures and food, and it’s ultimately less time off work than Japan would have been (I don’t have paid vacation, so everything I do is carefully balanced with “how much is this going to cost me”). Win win, right?
Mostly, yes. I’m still a little angsty, because I would have had New York (albeit on a lesser scale) ANYWAY, so I’m still out the whole of a vacation to Japan. I thought on this a little bit while jamming forks into the dishwasher, and realized I could maybe use the situation to my advantage. See, our trip to Japan was to have been 10 days. This never really sat right with me, because it seems like a really long way to go for less than 2 weeks, but Ed uncharacteristically put his foot down and insisted we take a slightly shorter trip than I like. I agreed at the time, because let’s face it, Japan was international trip #4 of 6 in 2019 alone so sure, I could give up a few days. I want a longer trip though, so I suggested another compromise on top of the other 50 compromises we’ve both made over the weekend: I will stop attempting to cram a do-over Japan trip into our rapidly dwindling 2019 and be satisfied with upgrading New York from Working Trip to Actual Vacation, in exchange for a minimum of two full weeks in Japan in 2020.
This was agreed to. We hugged on it. It’s the plan at the moment and I like it, but it will probably change 7 more times before we get anything resolved with the airline regarding our unused tickets for last week.
I am so good at compromise, you guys!
I’ve been slowly unpacking my suitcase, and it is very sad times. I’ve been hitting the pumpkin pie a little harder than usual to help me get through it. Thank god for whipped cream.
taking lsd before crossing the brooklyn bridge: check
I’m sure there’s some sort of interesting psychological reason behind my feeling like I must always apologize before complaining, but I’m not really in the mood to examine the science behind my emotions .. so I’ll just jump right into the justification: I know things could be so much worse and I feel awful for complaining, BUT.
I’m so, so, so sad. We are supposed to be in Japan right now for our vacation – not a working vacation, not a few days tacked onto the end of work trip, but an actual vacation, with hotels and spending money and tickets to see things. I’d been planning this trip since at least January – the flights were booked in March, hotels and train routes researched, half a million things scheduled and arranged and paid in advance – and we were supposed to have left yesterday, to fly into Haneda Airport. We didn’t go. And instead of being unable to sleep at 2am in Tokyo, I’m sitting at my desk trying to care about work and being awfully fatalistic about every little thing that comes my way.
The night before we were supposed to leave – literally 16 hours before our flight departed – we got wind (harrr) of Super Typhoon Hagibis bearing down on Japan, effectively shutting the country down for at least the weekend (and possibly longer, depending on the amount of damage the storm does). It’s not traditionally typhoon season in Japan (I researched this!), but Hagibis started out as a tropical storm that quickly grew into a Serious Situation faster than anyone thought possible, bypassing the “typhoon” title and going right into “Super Typhoon”. Windows are boarded up, store shelves are empty, hatches have been battened, and all flights and rail service has been cancelled for October 12 (with warnings that the cancellations may continue into the 13th and beyond). The Rugby World Cup and Japanese Grand Prix have cancelled games and races this weekend. The entire country is planning for Bad Times Ahead.
Who the fuck are we to fly into a country in the middle of a natural disaster and expect to be entertained? Personal safety aside, I can’t justify that level of entitlement. Ed and I armed ourselves with cats and blankets and made some fast decisions: we cancelled our trip. We didn’t know if our flight would even make it off the ground, and we weren’t comfortable with just waiting around to see. And even if it did, what then? We land in Tokyo and will either be trapped in the airport if trains have already shut down, or we’d get to our hotel and be unable to leave. That isn’t what I want out of a vacation, and I don’t want people to have to cater to me while concerned for their homes and lives .. so we got on the phone and started making calls. First up was Expedia, who understood the situation and got us full, immediate refunds for the pre-paid and technically non-refundable hotel bookings. I contacted our pet sitter to cancel the week, cancelled our parking reservation, and looked into the other things I had obsessively planned. The biggest hurdle was going to be the flight reservation, but we were unable to do anything about it because all the call centres were closed.
The following morning, we gathered in the living room to continue the Cancellation Spree. Unfortunately, this is where everything went to (even more) shit: the flights were booked partially with reward miles and partially cash. We had to contact the agency we used to redeem the miles, who tried in vain to contact the airline (their lines were crazy jammed for some reason) but ultimately had to give up when she couldn’t get through after an hour. Without the airline’s authorization, the agency could not issue us a refund, full stop. We had her cancel the fights, and she advised us to contact the airline ourselves after the storm had passed to see if we could get their authorization for the refund. Without it, we’re boned. Hooray!
The airline’s website does acknowledge that shit’s all fucky thanks to the typhoon, so their website says that people should call from the 15th onward to talk about refunds. That’s good! They specifically call out flights that were disrupted on the 11th, 12th, and 13th. That’s .. good? That’s the catch, though: our flight was on the 10th, and landed on the evening of the 11th. Does that qualify in their refund timeline? Also complicating matters: our flight DID LEAVE. It departed YVR at 1640, and landed in HND at 1833. We technically could have flown to Tokyo without issue, and just had to deal with that little super typhoon thing while there.
That’s where I sit right now. I have no idea if we’ll be refunded for our flights or not, or if they’ll stick to the rules and say nope, sorry. Without that information, I can’t reschedule us for anything else. At the moment, I could rebook us on the same flight to Tokyo for next Thursday, try to find new hotels in Tokyo and Kyoto, and cross my fingers that the country isn’t hit too badly by the typhoon, but I need to wait to see if we’ll get the refund or at least credit for the flights, or potentially be out another $2k. Our JR Rail passes are another issue: they’re good for three months past the issue date, which means have to be used by November 15th or returned before that date for an 80% refund. By the time I get this information, it’ll likely be too expensive to book the flight for two days out, and the 17th is the only other day we could possibly leave for this trip. I am in limbo, which is the place I hate most in the world (even more than Calgary). I am super sad and laden with the unknowns. I am freezing my ass off at work instead of being on vacation. We have no food in the house, no Thanksgiving plans, and no idea what we’re going to do next. EVERYTHING IS THE WORST EVER.
Oh, and the landscapers destroyed my Tower of London poppy and took the shattered pieces. It was in our yard as a tribute to my grandfather’s service in WW1. It’s literally irreplaceable – they sold the poppies from the original exhibit, and they’re all gone. Ed discovered the destruction yesterday morning, which just added to the overall assessment that the universe is garbage. All of the things are made of suck.
I feel like a brat for being so upset over a ruined vacation. I know it’s not the end of the world. I know I’ll probably get to go to Japan again, even if I have to wait until next year. I know I travel a lot, and if I have to miss one trip out of a dozen, boo hoo for me. But .. I was really looking forward to this trip. I’d spent the last 6 months being excited for yesterday, and in the course of an hour, everything went to hell. I am sad.
delicious juice dot com 