Travel and Food

Since I can’t sleep well, I’ve been watching a lot of YouTube videos. Lately, I’m kind of focused on food videos, especially street food. The one channel I found is call Migrationology by Mark Wiens. I believe he is based out of Bangkok, Thailand but he travels the work with his wife and kid, eating and blogging. He’s done entire series of video food blogs in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and even Los Angeles.

Prior to kidney failure and dialysis, I traveled quite a bit. A lot of it was for my friend’s company in China, where I was volunteering as their CFO. I used to travel to Chengdu via Hong Kong for one week each quarter. It’s not a lot compared to people who travel all the time but one year I collected something like 56 boarding passes. I had frequent flyer status on OneWorld and American Airlines, and had to send in my passport to the State Department to add pages since I had no room for new visas. Since dialysis, I’ve done zero travel. Even though there is a three-day break each week on hemodialysis, I just didn’t have the will or strength to travel. I remember planning a trip where I would take Amtrak to Seattle, stay one night in a hotel, then fly home in time for the next dialysis session. That went nowhere. I was supposed to go to Ireland and Scotland with my sister’s family, and South Korea with an ex-coworker (she is from Korea), but you can’t expect people to abstain from travel just because you’re on dialysis.

Anyway, while watching Mark run around and eat his way through hundreds of videos, I definitely felt jealousy and regret. I believe he said he was 29 years old, has a lovely wife and son, and has traveled all over the world. I’m not sure what he does for a living; maybe he makes a lot of money video blogging on YouTube. The regret part is thinking about the past, when I was married, relatively healthy on the outside, and traveling a lot. I’m not as adventurous as a eater, but I recognize many places in Mark’s videos because I’ve been there before, in what seems like a previous life. The jealousy is looking forward. I’m wary of counting on a donor kidney transplant since it’s been a turbulent three year wait so far. What if both donors don’t work out again? Will I be able to hold on for a deceased donor transplant? Even after transplant, can I eat like Mark on the videos? A strict heart and kidney healthy diet means not eating almost everything found on YouTube food videos.

In the meantime, I still can’t sleep. I believe I only got about 4 hours last night with a three hour gap from 1:00 am to 4:00 am. I watched a lot of food videos during those three hours.