2025 was a year that, on the surface, looked full. Full in the way social calendars and passport pages like to measure things. There were stamps on my passport—and I’m genuinely running out of pages—new cities and countries, long walks through unfamiliar streets, and conversations with people who once existed only as names on a screen or voices over a frequency. I crossed borders with ease, stepped into cultures not my own, and kept saying yes to learning, even when it was uncomfortable.
I hate to admit it, but I once carried some quiet prejudices about China. The kind you don’t announce out loud, but let settle somewhere in the back of your mind. They were shaped by headlines, by political noise, by narratives repeated often enough to feel convincing. And yes, by a few past encounters that lingered in memory longer than they should have. Travel, however, has a way of humbling you. It confronts your assumptions without ceremony and leaves you no choice but to look closer.
Autumn has always felt like a gentle exhale. Not an ending, not quite a beginning—just a pause long enough to notice your own breathing. It’s the season that gives permission to slow down, to move deliberately, to finally wrap myself in the thick wool sweaters and coats that spend most of the year untouched in the perpetual heat of home. There is comfort in that weight, in fabric meant to protect rather than perform. It signals a shift, subtle but undeniable, away from endurance and toward intention.
What was supposed to be a simple two-and-a-half-hour train ride stretched into a weary four-hour crawl to Maastricht. The day before, a train accident had disrupted the line, and what began as a mild inconvenience slowly turned into a quiet lesson in surrender—the kind travel often insists we learn, whether we’re ready or not. Platforms blurred into one another, updates came and went without certainty, and the illusion of a neat schedule dissolved somewhere between stations.
Traveling around Europe, especially within the Schengen Zone, has a certain fluidity to it. Borders blur into railway tracks and bus routes; a new country is often just a few hours away, announced not by checkpoints but by subtle changes in language, architecture, and rhythm. Movement here feels effortless, almost taken for granted. On one of my rare free days in Amsterdam, with no meetings to rush to and no agendas to defend, I decided to take the train south to Antwerp—a city near the Dutch border that has long stood as one of Europe’s vital crossroads for trade, shipping, and learning.
18 days. 18,000 kilometers. 18 extra kilos of luggage that somehow carried more questions than clothes.
This was the longest work trip I’ve ever taken, both in distance and in weight. Not just the kind measured by flight hours and baggage allowances, but the kind that settles into your bones. It was a blur of airports that all started to look the same, meetings that bled into one another, conferences where time zones dissolved and coffee became a survival tool. Somewhere between security checks and boarding calls, there were moments when I’d stare at departure screens and feel an odd dislocation—physically present, mentally suspended between where I had been and where I was headed next.
It began on one of those listless afternoons after a midnight shift. The kind where time feels elastic and the world, muted. I was idly scrolling through the internet when a message from my friend Jery appeared:
“Nievie and Hana are going to Australia this September. I’ll send you their itinerary. You in?”
Hop Inn Hotel stays just got even more rewarding. The leading budget hotel network in the Asia Pacific launches the “Stay, Fly, and Shop Promo” to delight loyal guests with a chance to win a trip to Japan for two, a ¥100,000 shopping spree, and more exciting prizes!
