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Well I haven’t posted here in awhile, good to be back! After Moldova last summer, I continued traveling across Europe, from Istanbul up to Copenhagen then down through Switzerland to Italy. Overall, it was fifteen countries in about five weeks (see the homepage for the list of countries in order). Soon after, I started as a full-timer at Jane Street Capital! Work so far has been great, and I was even able to visit the United Kingdom and Ireland back in December as part of a business trip to our London office. And this trip is actually “on the way” to two weeks at our Hong Kong office, thus the series’ title. Daily dim sum breakfast, here I come! One downside of full-time life is the limited number of vacation days relative to undergrad years, but I thankfully managed to save up enough vacation for this one week trip in March. Basically it’s Spring Break all over again!
Originally, a friend I met in North Korea (now that’s a sentence you don’t often hear) and I were hoping to visit Iran. We had even started the visa application process with a local tour company. Iran, like North Korea, is one of the few states where US citizens must go through an official tour company to visit the country (Turkmenistan and Bhutan are also in this category). And yes, they are both also high on my list (Aaron and I had attempted to visit Turkmenistan with all its Gates of Hell glory on our trip last summer but were stymied by the visa policies of capricious authoritarian regimes). The visa process was overall rather confusing, especially as we were cutting it quite close. There was unfortunately little information on the internet or even from our tour company. As an aside, while I read great things about Key2Persia on the internet, I found my contact there to be incredibly unhelpful. She seemed to have a tenuous grasp of how to use email, and inexplicably told me and Albert to report in person at the nonexistent Iranian Embassy in Washington DC to apply for visas…
Of course, this all turned out to not matter in the end. America in its infinite wisdom elected this wonderful man Donald Drumpf in November. And he chose to roll out this glorious visa ban in January, to #MakeAmericaSaferAgain…or something. Unsurprisingly, foreign governments weren’t all to happy about this. And in particular, Iran decided to ban travel from United States in response. We had thankfully not purchased any flights, as I’d learned my lesson last year from purchasing the flight out of Ashgabat before our Turkmenistan visas were approved. So, it was time to find a new plan. Eventually, we settled on Morocco and Senegal, with a 24 hour stop in Dubai on the way to Hong Kong for me. On the way back from Hong Kong, I also managed to squeeze in 36 hours in Seoul. I’ll (sadly?) no longer be that weird guy who’s been to only North Korea. I was of course bummed about Iran, but hopefully things stabilize sometime soon so I can make it there. Meanwhile, I was of course excited to be traveling again, especially for my first trip to Africa.
A couple of weeks later, armed with a yellow fever vaccine and anti-malarial drugs, I was headed to Morocco via Royal Air Maroc! My doctor very helpfully spent five minutes reading aloud all the possible side effects of the former, e.g. “you have a 1 in 400,000 chance of developing terrible and permanent neurological damage!” Thankfully, as I write this, I seem to have escaped the worst…