Upon our arrival back home (San Francisco or Sacramento, both are home to us) Jason and I will have spent approximately 355 straight days in Asia at each others’ side.  In this case, when I say “days”, I literally mean almost 24 hours per day and most definitely 7 days every week.

In a nutshell, spending that much time together while traveling has had its side effects.  We have been almost the only friends to each other for a year, so there are bound to be some inside jokes and habits that have developed that might prove to be obnoxious to the outsider.

Here are a list of things that Jason and I promise NOT to do when we come home:

1. We promise NOT to complain about how expensive everything is in the States.  We will bite our tongues when the phrase “WELLL, back in Vietnam this would be a FRACTION of the price!!” comes to our minds as our eyes meander through the menu at dinner.
2. We promise NOT to be cheap and to tip our servers at restaurants.  Asia has spoiled us in the fact that tipping is non-existent.  We’ve been growing accustomed to this habit, so we will force ourselves to quickly adapt back to our mainland ways.
3. We (Jason) promise NOT to constantly mention how annoying it is that people aren’t saying hello to us everywhere we go.  As you can imagine, Jason was quite the circus act in many places in Asia, especially China.  If you ask him he won’t lie, he got quite the big head from all of the stares, giddy smiles, hellos and pictures taken of himself.  I warned him that he will no longer be the celebrity of California.  He promises not to sulk.
4. We promise NOT to excessively peer over at each other and giggle to ourselves while saying “you remember that??” while in the company of friends.  We know how obnoxious inside jokes can be when you’re on the outside.  Like I said before, we have been practically each other’s only friends for a YEAR, so we are aware of how many stupid inside jokes we have.  We’ll try our very best to tune it down for your sake, although you can’t really blame us if it’s just a really awesome joke.
5. We promise NOT to say the following phrase every 5 minutes: “OMG this totally reminds me of when ____ happened on our trip!!”
6. We absolutely, indefinitely, REALLY promise NOT to make anyone sit through an awful slideshow of all 7,000+ photos of our trip.  We wouldn’t want to sit through anyone’s Trilobite dinosaur slides, no matter how exciting it may be to the creator, so we’ll refrain until specifically asked.
7. We promise NOT to complain about how non-existent the subway system is in California and how awesome they are in Asia.  Along those lines, we also promise not to mention how weird it is to be driving again.
8. We promise NOT to constantly whine about how early everything closes, especially bars.  We frequently found ourselves up until 5am or 6am in Korea without even realizing how late (early) it was, and then we found ourselves eating at one of the many restaurants open at 5am.  In our 1:30am stupor, we promise to only be happy and tired.

These are the only things we can think of for now, but if you have any suggestions, please feel free to warn us now rather than later.  What would you like us to refrain from doing when you see us back at home?   You wouldn’t want to be on the other end of these as they happen over and over again…

Filed under: Other Trip Things