Why East Asia? Leaving Home for a Life in South Korea & Japan
East Asia bound! Alun announces he's off to South Korea, and then onto Japan to commence his Japan working holiday visa, but why? We hear Alun's motives, as he prepares for life in two countries that he's fantasised about for a long, long time.
Tales of a Trip returns with a powerful message from a seasoned traveller. We dive into prejudice, the real impact of expats on local communities, and why integration matters when living abroad.
Support the show and access the Lost & Found section, as we continue to discuss the thought-provoking travel topics above, as well as how we've observed backpacking change over the past decade.
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Japan WHV episode link: https://www.tripologypodcast.com/episodes/japan-working-holiday-visa-success
TIMESTAMPS:
00:00 - Intro
03:15 - Booking flights: Who's the best?
06:28 - South Korea: What's Alun's plan?
16:03 - Pre-flight packing rituals
23:43 - Tales of a Trip: Living abroad, prejudice, and refusing to integrate
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TRANSCRIPT:
Alun:
[0:00] Hello and welcome to this episode of Tripology. It's a backpacking show all about backpacking, travelling, zooming about the earth. I'm Alun and I'm here with one of the greatest, most experienced travellers of all time. It's the ever preparatory Adam.
Adam:
[0:16] Thanks ever so much for joining us for another week guys. We really do appreciate it. Awesome show on the cards today mate. We're going to talk about what you've been doing in preparation for your big trip traveling east and then we're going to go through some objectives that i've got for 2026 what on earth is in store for us and then of course at the end of the show stay tuned for tales of a trip where we hear a story from one of you guys i.
Alun:
[0:39] Finally did it adam there's been a place since the dawn of time that i've always thought about going but never gone to and it's a place that you are very very familiar with a place that you've often sojourned to and uh you I've been a little bit jealous, envious. The green-eyed monster has sunk its proverbial teeth deep into my travel feet,
Preparing for East Asia
Alun:
[1:04] and I've decided to embark to where you know so well. I'm of course speaking of East Asia, specifically Japan, specifically Korea, and not in that order, my friend, because I had to just do it. I've been here. I've been very, very comfortable in my family home. I've been having a lovely, lovely Christmas and New Year. But there always comes a time where you go, listen, I'm going to have to just book this flight. I'm going to have to load up Skyscanner, my favorite travel flight aggregation service, not a sponsor, and see what's available. And just do it. Just click. Click around. Book a flight. I'm going to Korea.
Adam:
[1:48] Next week so you have an amazing time with your family but you said to them guys i've really enjoyed this but it's just not asian enough mate i've got to be honest with you there is some reverse jealousy going on some reverse envy because that's right you've been patient you've been patient you've bided your time and now that you've got a working holiday visa for japan, it's it's like the one that i really wanted you know i might even go as far to say would i trade a couple of my working holiday visas that i've already worked wiped from my memory just for that sweet sweet japanese work visa it'll be there'll be some consideration i think you're gonna have an amazing time and i'm gonna definitely use it as an opportunity to come and see you like a like a best friend should exactly.
Alun:
[2:34] I've triggered the old reverse jealousy as was always my intention we of course did an episode about a year ago about me getting that working holiday visa in the process that that was. Adam will link that in the description so anyone wants to hear how I got the working holiday visa can. I, of course, chose Japan for my working holiday visa, which bound me to start
Flight Booking Strategies
Alun:
[2:54] in Korea and then take a cheap flight to Japan before the commencement day of that visa. So Korea is going to be the first adventure. In the very next episode of Tripology that comes out after this one, I will be in Korea and I'll be telling you all about my first steps in that wonderful country are you good at booking flights mate because i pride myself on being able to get ever such a cheap deal when it comes to the old flight kin.
Adam:
[3:21] Uh i i do spend a long time booking flights actually you know platforms like sky scanner etc they're kind of aggregators and you can choose different routes and do like multi-city options to try and get cheaper prices you go through you know hubs there are lots of hubs throughout europe sometimes you go through Frankfurt, Istanbul, whatever to get over east they can be a little bit cheaper, Middle East of course, so I would say I would say I am pretty good at booking flights if what you mean is, getting a good deal but that isn't always i'm not always trying to find the cheapest price i sometimes try and find the most interesting route.
Alun:
[3:56] Yeah it's a good idea sometimes if you've got like a lovely leo somewhere you've not been you think oh that's enough time i am just trying to choose the cheapest price because i uh don't have much money but i um so that is a totally.
Adam:
[4:12] Fine reason to be trying to book a cheap flight?
Alun:
[4:15] Skyscanner, of course, is my aggregator of choice. I very, very rarely find a cheaper price on other platforms than I do on Skyscanner. I always use a VPN, which, you know, protect my private network. And I just go so anonymous in private browsing, VPN on, I load up Skyscanner like a little secret agent. And one little tip I'd give for anyone searching for flights is be entirely flexible about when you're intending to leave. Because sometimes prices can fluctuate by literally hundreds of pounds just a couple of days apart so i always choose the perfect little day with the cheapest price you can search by the whole month i looked at the whole of january and found a very very beautiful little flight to korea to seoul just at the end of january can you guess how much i paid for a trip to seoul.
Adam:
[5:05] It's funny you talking about skyscanner so openly and then when it came to the vpn chat you didn't mention the vpn you use people are going to be listening to this thinking oh he said they're not a sponsor but maybe he's getting a backhand or i'll tell you one one company is not paying it'll be the vpn company they didn't get a mention there's no money changing hands there they're not a sponsor.
Alun:
[5:25] Yeah if you if you have a vpn company and you wish that i used you whilst on sky scala get in touch it's our business email topologypodcast at gmail.com.
Adam:
[5:35] Yeah oh nice one um what do i think you paid what would be a reasonable i'm a bit out of touch actually with prices, flights to Asia. So I'm going to say, the 250 quid is ringing around in my head for some reason but i don't know if that's.
Alun:
[5:51] Save 50 quid versus you mate only 200 pounds and it'll fly to my favorite layover city shanghai but this time only five hours not enough time i shan't be bullied into leaving the airport this time my friends i'm gonna stay put in shanghai airport five hours and then off straight to seoul so i arrive you know just just less than 24 hours prior to me setting off okay i mean after i set off actually i'm not
Exploring Korea
Alun:
[6:19] gonna go back in time blimey.
Adam:
[6:20] That is a good deal um are you uh have you got any knowledge of korea seoul itself have you got like a rough plan an itinerary you did mention another flight to japan have you already booked that out of the country.
Alun:
[6:33] Oh let me deal with your questions in order adam so firstly it's like justin's.
Adam:
[6:39] Email a couple of weeks ago.
Alun:
[6:41] Mate, I have no plans or intentions in Seoul, Korea. I have gone. I've booked that flight as a completely discovery-based exploration route. I'm going to rely on you very much to give me tips and tricks. I don't know any Korean. I know very little about Korea. And I'm just going in order to have my eyes opened to that beautiful part of the world. I don't know exactly when I'm going to go to japan although i do know it has to be before april 17th and as such i've checked flights from seoul to tokyo and i know that those are around 50 bucks so i'm going to book that sometime in the near future okay but i'm very very excited to discover korea i really am looking forward to it i've heard naught but good things of course where is dan our friend and youtuber he loves korea so much so that he basically bases a lot of his personality around it Yeah.
Adam:
[7:40] Yeah, no, you're totally right. I could tell you everything I know about Korea. I'd probably save that for another episode, maybe write you up some sort of Word document. But just to let me drop a little idea in so that it's, you know, just plant a little seed so that it's somewhere in there, mate. If you were to zigzag across South Korea, as you like to do, traveling overland, maybe even go to Jeju. That's an island off the south and then back over. You can get a boat, a ferry, as I did, from Busan, which is down in the southeast, over to Fukwaka, which is then mainland Japan. So if you don't want to fly and you want it to make sense, you can just zigzag down from Seoul over a couple of weeks and then go overland on a boat. I mean, not overland on a boat, but you don't come off, you know what I mean, go up in a plane to Fukuoka and then you can get a Shinkansen wherever you want to go, basically.
Alun:
[8:35] Well, that sounds like a very sensible and smart plan. And it's reasons like that, which is why I do a travel podcast with you, mate. I've got up to sort of two and a half months in Korea, potentially. So there's plenty of time isn't it that's.
Adam:
[8:49] More than enough time i was there for three and a half weeks and i managed to do a lot of things but it is going to be bloody cold mate i mean south korea gets colder than i think most people realize so i don't know how much you're
Cultural Insights on Korea
Adam:
[9:01] going to be able to do outside um but go hungry.
Alun:
[9:05] Well it's actually the same temperature there right now as it is where i am in scotland now and you're inside so it's going to be perfect uh seamless i'm not even going to notice the difference a lot of people say i'm going to go on some side quests in my own career i'm going to try and start a k-pop band i'm going to try and open a korean barbecue restaurant and i'm going to uh i'm just going to try and make peace really whilst i'm over there maybe.
Adam:
[9:30] A skincare product.
Alun:
[9:31] Yeah if.
Adam:
[9:32] You wanted something else that they're known for.
Alun:
[9:33] Yeah yeah and i'm going to try and start a skincare brand whilst i'm over there as well.
Adam:
[9:40] Um if you're going to be there for about two months am i going to be able to come over and see you in korea because i didn't manage to see jeju but i would love to um it's wicked but you'll love it mate what sort of aspect of korea are you most excited about don't say the north then we will get cancelled no.
Alun:
[9:57] I'm most excited about your reaction to me being there because i feel like a little bit over the last few years you've sort of lauded it over me that there's this part of the world that you've explored that I haven't. I, of course, have, you know, traveled a lot more rapidly than you over the course of my life. You've traveled for the same length of time, but you've been to fewer places more in depth. And I've always felt like it was a little sword that you often brandished in my face, the fact that you've been and spent time in Korea and Japan. So I'm looking forward to sort of disarming you like a matador, like a Zorro, like a troubadour, you know, getting that blade out of your hand and maybe discovering it more in more detail than you ever have and telling you some facts about Korea. I'm really motivated by envy and revenge.
Japan vs. Korea
Adam:
[10:47] Yeah, to be completely transparent, I mean, a lot of people wouldn't necessarily know this or if they'd just heard a couple of episodes or maybe would ask you why have you only heard a couple of episodes? Maybe you're new to the show. Go back and listen to the whole thing from the beginning, but I've travelled for probably only, Like you said, the same length of time, but maybe only visited half as many countries as you.
Alun:
[11:08] Yeah, something like that. So, you know, I just feel like there's an imbalance in the east of Asia and I need to address it. I need to, deeply. I'm joking, of course, I'm not that competitive. I really have always wanted to go there. I think Japan and Korea are two of the most major thought of, recognized universally. Honestly the the two countries that i've not been to that people are surprised that i've not been to and i've always wanted to go there japan of course huge part of my childhood video games music anime uh like studio ghibli films i've always uh really wanted to go there and i just can't wait.
Adam:
[11:50] Yeah can at the risk of probably putting my foot in it and saying something inadvertently racist or offensive um but you have to give me give me a hand to articulate this japan and south korea are countries that are culturally and also aesthetically so wildly different from anything that we know in the west but they are still absolutely as developed and powerful technologically advanced you know in terms of their economy and all that sort of stuff so it's very rare to be able to experience that in this day and age they're really the only probably only the two places on earth as well as some parts of india perhaps that culturally are so so different from what we know but actually in some ways feel very similar in.
Alun:
[12:39] What ways do you think they feel similar.
Adam:
[12:40] So i'll give you a little anecdote of me walking around kyoto a couple of years ago i i looked at this scene and i you know i just explore on foot for hours and hours and hours sometimes doing 25 30 kilometers in a day and i remember sitting down on a bench uh in the outskirts of kyoto, And I looked at the scene in front of me, which was a man walking down the road with his briefcase, past a row of shops, some cars driving past, you know, there's an office block over to the left. There was a bit of a graffiti on the wall. And it just looked so familiar, just looked exactly like the sort of scene you would see back in London or in England somewhere. But if someone had just put a Japanese filter over it.
Alun:
[13:22] Yeah, right.
Adam:
[13:23] And it felt a little bit like I was in some sort of virtual reality Japanese
Travel Experiences and Expectations
Adam:
[13:31] simulation or something, which sounds ridiculous to say. But you will feel almost at home because of how familiar some areas of South Korea and Japan feel. But it will be so wildly different because you're obviously about as far east as you can go.
Alun:
[13:46] I had that experience in India once when I was with my then partner watching a band play live. And it's a band called Indian Ocean, and it's like popular Indian music. And we were in a crowd of Indian people watching this Indian band in an Indian mall in Bombay, in Mumbai. And I had this realization, although it's an obvious thing that I probably should have considered prior. it's like this is a country that, has its own popular culture that isn't borrowing from the West. It has its own fashion and its own music and its own cinema and its own movies and its own stars. And I think a lot of cultures evolve and build themselves up to borrow all those things. It's like, okay, we have our local culture, but we watch Hollywood. We have our local culture, but we listen to popular music. We put taylor swift on the radio you know but in india that's not the case they have their own culture and have megalithic popular icons from that culture that they're completely you know they've evolved completely separately from the west i think japan is is similar to that and korea is similar to that and now we're seeing this phenomena where the west is actually borrowing the cultural icons from them so it's really really interesting and i'm very excited to just go and Yeah.
Adam:
[15:13] I look forward to talking to you about it and I'm sure we all look forward to hearing about it on the show because what I say to people when they ask me for my recs on Japan, I sort of say, I bet it's almost exactly as you imagine it.
Alun:
[15:28] Yeah.
Adam:
[15:29] You will, because we've been so heavily exposed to Japan, Japanese aesthetics, signage, fashion, all of the manga and the anime and all this sort of stuff. We already have an idea, an image in our head. We can visualize exactly what it might like through popular culture and movies. You will get there and go, yeah, it's exactly as I imagined it. And it's so magical. It's amazing. You're going to love it, man. I'm so excited for you.
Pre-Flight Rituals
Alun:
[15:54] I can't wait. I'm looking forward to sharing it all with you all. It's going to be a real blast. So Korea on next week's Tropology. Do you have any pre-flight rituals when you're getting ready to go on a big adventure? Do you have any things that you like to do in preparation? Are you a last-minute packer or do you get real stuck in in the weeks prior?
Adam:
[16:14] Last-minute packer. I mean, definitely the same day, usually just a couple of hours beforehand. And because, you know, I'm just looking at my bag on the floor now during the recording, it's just a 35 liter carry-on so it's i i think when you pack a bag so many times and for so long it's just uh completely you just go into autopilot don't you i just think oh i know it roughly takes me 15 minutes to pack my bag so as long as i've got the big five the passport the ticket i'm gonna have to name the five now i just said big five because it sounded good but you know you know I mean, wallet, phone, passport, bag.
Alun:
[16:52] Wallet, phone, passport, money, and yourself.
Adam:
[16:55] If anything goes wrong, you're fine. But no, I don't really have anything in the way of a ritual. Do you mean kind of almost like OCD superstitious type things or...
Alun:
[17:09] No, well, I mean, historically, I've been the same as you. I mean, when I was heading to Brazil last time we physically saw each other, you saw me pack my bag just in the moments before getting on a train. And that's historically been my mode. But this is such a colossal trip because when I go to Japan, I'm actually not allowed to exit Japan. I lose my visa if I do. It's a single entry working holiday visa. So I know that this is the last time I'll step foot in the UK or in sort of anything that can be described loosely as home for a good long while. And as such, I've been so disconcertingly prepared this time around. It's a week out from my flight at the moment. And already I've gone through all my main bags, my backpack, my fanny pack in meticulous detail.
Adam:
[18:00] Bum bag for our English listeners.
Alun:
[18:01] Yeah my fanny pack my bum bag i've gone through those and with help from my mom like stitched and mended and darned any little areas any rips any little bits and pieces like that i went and thoroughly washed my rucksack like submerged it scrubbed it hung it up in the shower to drip dry i've got everything all clean and laid out and that for me was like it was a beautiful pre-flight ritual. I felt like I was preparing an old battle-hardened warrior in my bag for yet another journey. I saw him there dripping in the shower, a bag that has been with me to six of seven continents, you know, many countries. I think we're approaching 70 countries, me and him together now. And that was like, it filled me with pride. And I thought, that's a good, I'm going to do that every time I go on a trip now, give him a wash.
Adam:
[18:56] It's so funny you're describing the process. Sounds very methodical, you know, there's care taken, there's attention to detail. Sounds very Japanese, actually, if I might say.
Alun:
[19:06] Yeah, well, things are about to get a bit more Japanese in my life. I'm going to start doing things like that.
Adam:
[19:12] Now that you've done two preparations are you now on team sort of preparation or are you on you know the old team you got you got an idea of both now do you think it's better to be doing it the new way the newfound preparation way or do you prefer the old slap dash chuck everything in a bag and run out the door well.
Alun:
[19:31] There's a moment where you have to start making moves and book a flight and stuff and i think emotionally that can put you in two spaces this time around for me booking the flight was an emotionally disconcerting experience. Sometimes I'm really excited and I'm like, oh, this is locked in now. But I've had such a good time here with my family. Honestly, when I went on Skyscanner with a VPN in private browsing, found the cheapest price, cheaper than anyone else can get, got it,
Single Entry Visa Realities
Alun:
[19:59] bought the flight, I felt a little bit emotional. Like, oh, you know, now that's locked in and I'm, you know, I have to go and I'm not going to see my family again for a long time I felt a little bit sad about it and doing that ritual giving my bag lucky a wash repairing it made me excited it served the function for me of like being like okay now I'm getting ready I'm sort of building towards it you know what this is like, he's ready for this trip and we're gonna go it made me feel really ready so in that sense I think it was good to do it was good to do that bit of preparation to anticipate the journey that i'm about to take and i imagine that i will still the night before get everything into lucky and be like okay now we're ready to go and i'll still have that last minute rush of adrenaline um but i do feel more relaxed the fact that everything's kind of sorted a week out.
Adam:
[20:55] Yeah i bet it sounds good mate do you know what live on air live on air i've just learned that your visa's single entry.
Alun:
[21:01] Yeah.
Adam:
[21:02] I don't know if you were watching the video at the same time, but my mouth popped open. Because that's a little bit shocking. If you do forget anything, you know that... I'm only down the road, so I can always pop up. But that's surprising. That really is. I wonder why that is. That's a bit of a restriction.
Alun:
[21:18] You can apply for a special exit, but you have to apply for it. You can be like, oh, I've had a family emergency. Can I come back and be on the working visa again? And they can choose to approve that. But technically, the visa is single entry.
Adam:
[21:30] Okay. So, I mean, it doesn't mean that you can't leave early, but you're looking down the barrel of 14 and a half, 15 months away from the family now.
Alun:
[21:38] Yeah, but like I said on a previous episode, I'm not viewing Japan as an endurance challenge. I will leave if I don't like it, but I'm sure I will love it. And I also, I think maybe it's time for my family to come visit me in Japan. They've never visited me whilst I'm on the road. So they've never really seen me in my natural habitat since I was 21 years old at university. So it's going to be good for them to come, I think, and see me out there in Japan making stuff happen.
Adam:
[22:06] Are they interested in Japan as a country as well? Because, you know, please let this be a message to any parents who listen to the show and have a child who does travel or children who travels, or even anyone who's listening to the show who has friends in interesting parts of the world. Please go and see them. Because, you know, I've only ever had my dad and my sister come out to visit me once in the last 11 years, and they both came in the same week when I was living in Canada. So... I've always thought to myself if i had friends which you know now i have got friends in really cool places all over the world people that i've met through traveling or you know have worked in different countries they often say oh if you're ever in southeast asia you know you've always got a room at our place be careful because i will take you up on it.
Alun:
[22:51] Well there you go and more to that point here is an open invitation to anyone listening to the podcast who knows me personally even peripherally you are invited come stay with me in japan i think we're a big travel community and I'd love for everyone to come. But that's it this week for my personal stories and tales of me setting off and zooming off on an adventure because I would really love to hear a story from one of our beautiful listeners. If you go to tripologypodcast.com, there's a little contact bit where you can go to Tales of a Trip and record three minutes of your greatest travel story. You can tell us about the time that you found yourself machete-ing through the Amazon jungle or the time that you lost your wallet on a bus in, you know, somewhere less interesting.
Tales of a Trip
Alun:
[23:34] Those are the options you have. Send us a three-minute story. Tales of a trip, tripologypodcast.com. Let's hear what one of you had to say right now.
Tales of a Trip:
[23:43] Hi, my name is Remy, and I would like to tell you a little bit about my experiences about living and traveling abroad. So I've lived and worked in many countries across the world, such as Vietnam, Romania, Mauritius, Ivory Coast. And right now I'm completing a 12-month trip through New Zealand.
Tales of a Trip:
[24:10] And all these places I've been to have something in common as I've been over there in each of these places on my own.
Tales of a Trip:
[24:21] And it's actually a very great way to discover these countries if you really would like to get in, like you become a part of the society. I've got a great example with Romania, which is an amazing country in Europe that most that people don't know anything about. We usually have bad opinions about the population that we actually don't know anything about because we think about gypsies, we confuse them with Romanians. Romanians actually are Latin people and they live in an amazing country with the sea, the mountain, a lot of culture, a lot of history over there. And it's amazing to see it's actually in the middle of Europe and we still don't know much about them and we don't know about the culture we don't know about the economy we don't know that they grow and expanding all across Europe now with people young people with a lot of degrees and ability to speak many languages four to five languages per person which really is astonishing I've been there for six months living and working over there so So it's really an amazing way to discover the place. And I think traveling alone is actually the greatest way to open yourself to the whole world. You have to. I mean, you can't spend your own time on your own all the time. You have to open up to other people.
Tales of a Trip:
[25:50] And this actually helps out to reach locals, to get into contact with all the amazing people traveling. But after so many years traveling and living abroad, I can see now something kind of dangerous about this way of life, which is that you can easily meet some people who are just reproducing their own way of life in another country. They're just doing the touristic stuff and then trying to get their life back the way it was in another place which obviously ends up, bringing some conflict to the locals and changing their lifestyle but this is our country. This is theirs. This is theirs.
Alun:
[26:41] Remy there with a very, very interesting and personant tale of a trip. I think it was lovely to hear. Thank you so much for sending that in. Our listeners have a knack. I mean, I promise me and Adam don't listen to these messages prior. The first time we hear them is the first time you hear them. And very, very pertinent. They're talking about working holiday visas like the one I'm going to go and do in Japan.
Challenges of Cultural Assimilation
Alun:
[27:07] We'll touch on what he finished with there because I think that was a really salient point the idea that people go to a new place and try and recreate their, domestic lives like they had back in their home countries there whilst benefiting from some of the advantages that a different country might have what are your thoughts on that Adam.
Adam:
[27:28] Yeah it's obviously a sensitive subject um difficult not to say anything sort of too sort of negative or even borderline offensive i would like to think that i try and assimilate wherever i go but obviously there's there's only a certain amount of assimilation you can do i suppose a lot of it comes down to respecting another culture learning as much as you can about the environment you're in but i do agree with what remy said there can absolutely be a lot of problems that develop if you just try and live your own life wherever it is you're from and have sort of negative impacts or even conflict in some cases with people in the local environment. It's a shame it happens. Sometimes it might be completely innocent. You might not necessarily know. But I guess it comes down to sort of cherry picking, doesn't it? You move to a different country to start a new life or to make a positive change. And the fact of the matter is you can't cherry pick. You can't just choose the positive parts and then completely forget the negative ones. When you move to a country, you almost have to take all of it at the same time, I suppose.
Alun:
[28:37] Yeah, I mean, there's so much fruitful conversation to be had here. Because when you're traveling to a place and we talk all the time about a place's experience of you but there's so many different cultures at play there's like the local culture of the place that you're traveling to there's the culture of where you came from that you're obviously bringing in some sense to a place and then there's backpacker culture which is something else besides and then you know there's all these emergent cultures that are coming up now like digital nomad culture which is slightly different but an offshoot of backpacker culture and then you know.
Alun:
[29:11] Somewhere like Australia, where you can go on a working holiday visa and very much ensconce yourself in backpacker culture. There's all these people doing farm work and staying in hostels. And that's kind of like a very accepted part of a working holiday visa on Australia versus going on a working holiday visa in Japan, where maybe there's less of that culture, but a lot of people on working holiday visas end up like teaching English language. But, you know, maybe it's harder to make Japanese friends but so it's you kind of have to learn a bit of the language if you want to do that there's a lot of competing ideas I think this idea of people moving to a place and building their own culture there is really I mean most clear when it comes to like digital nomads in a place like Thailand digital nomad culture is unique because we call them digital nomads but of course most of them aren't they're just doing a remote job in a different country and benefiting from like a better exchange rate and earning foreign currency and then living more comfortably maybe tax evasion yeah right living more comfortably in a different place than they would if they had the same job living at home and you know are there issues with that yeah sure but you know i think there's like there's so much conversation to be had around that.
Adam:
[30:31] Yeah i think two things you'll probably experience this in some way shape or form when you move to Japan, actually, because you're someone from the West and you're either a backpacker or even a content creator. You might be tarred with the same brush as lots of other tourists in Japan. Kyoto, absolutely famous for it. A lot of the locals hate how busy it is. You might even hate how busy it is as a tourist, just to give you some idea. But because I follow a lot of content creators in Japan who are not Japanese, I know that there is a kind of an atmosphere, a noise around them at the moment, and it's not necessarily positive. Japan is such a content creator's playground that it's obviously attracted because it's very aesthetic and there's lots of weird and wonderful things to see in japan, um so it'll be interesting to get your thoughts and we'll have to sort of you know retrospectively we'll look back at this sort of question and see whether you've kind of felt that the other thing as well is because of our exposure through things like popular culture media films this kind of stuff news of course we tend to build up in our head maybe not even really realizing it but we have an opinion of a people or a culture or a nationality before we've even met someone from said country or been there ourselves and i think that that is incredibly dangerous because remy did mention that with romanian people yeah um they're not necessarily you know you don't meet that many romanian people funnily enough the last romanian person i met was in seoul korea um and she was absolutely wonderful wonderful woman really intelligent really inspiring We went for coffee together and ended up spending six hours walking around Gangnam.
Adam:
[32:15] But speaks multiple languages, just like Remy said. And I guess my example of that from first hand experience is when people, it's sad to say it on air, but people listening to this will understand, some people say negative things about Russians. And it's because of what's going on in the news, in the media, and has been for a while. And whenever someone says something like that to me, I say, Have you ever been to Russia? No, no, I haven't been. Have you ever met any Russians? No. I mean, does that not seem a little bit unfounded then?
Alun:
[32:49] A lot of our perceptions of all cultures are just based on what we're told about the political movements of that country on our version of the news. And that's like a really crazy, dangerous way to go around with that kind of information, isn't it?
Adam:
[33:05] When you say it like that, yeah, it sounds pretty ridiculous, to be honest. So I'm always very careful.
Alun:
[33:12] Yeah, and I think rightfully so. I am noticing more and more people, when talking about travel as a long-term lifestyle concept, are challenging of that and go, you know, oh, God, is that maybe ethical? Like, you're basically inserting yourself into a different culture. Like, how do you go about assimilating? How do you go about doing all that things? And I think it is an ongoing debate. I think as more people are traveling, it is becoming more and more controversial. More and more countries are saying, hey...
Alun:
[33:44] Are all these tourists sustainable? Are they good for our culture? Are they good for these places? And I think that travelers have a responsibility to be mindful of that when they visit a place. I know, you know, we have such a strong culture as backpackers of wanting the world to be free, of wanting to go and experience as many different places, living life to the fullest. But as more and more people do it, more and more people do it badly, as well as more and more people doing it well and i think that we have challenges as a community to make sure that that travel can be sustainable and we have a positive relationship with the places that we visit a lot of places are attracted by the money they can make from travelers but don't have the infrastructure set up to sort of protect what they already have and the natural beauty of the places that that are attracting these tourists and i think that it's going to be a conversation that needs to continue i don't have all the solutions but i do know that like remy i'm trying to be mindful of it and i encourage all the listeners to do the same i think that mindfulness and intention are the two biggest weapons we have right now in order to to make sure that we behave responsibly in the future and with that i think we'll have to end this week's episode and head over to the patreon section where we'll have some more little funny anecdotes and discussions adam so if people want to head there to the lost and found section there's a link in the description to our patreon thanks.
Adam:
[35:04] Thanks ever so much for sending the voice note in remy it was wonderful to hear from you and if you want to send one in there's a link in the description as well we look forward to it thanks ever so much for tuning in guys we hope to see you next week. Bye.
Adam:
[35:15] See you there. Bye!
