Last year at the Tribeca Film Festival my short film 'The Eight Percent' won the Delta Fly-In Movies Competition and as my prize Delta gave me some Business Class Elite International tickets to go anywhere I wanted.The choice was clear. I obviously had to go to the most expensive destination possible: Asia. Given how many Asian films I've seen and forced friends to see, it seemed like a much overdue journey.
So I set out on a month long trip starting in Hong Kong, traveling to Japan and then into Thailand, Cambodia and finally Vietnam. It was a great trip, horse racing in Hong Kong, Buddhist deer in Japan, climbing temples in Cambodia, hiking though the hills of Vietnam, you can't get much better than that. I met a lot of great people, ate a lot of good food and saw some pretty amazing places. Traveling by yourself is something I think everyone should do at some point, it's a chance to reflect, to go outside of your culture completely, to meet new people and to do some completely ill advised things that a more cautious traveling companion would dissuade you from doing which nevertheless lead to some real adventures. After a long trip traveling abroad you become so used to constantly moving from country to country and living with your bare essentials in a backpack that when you return home staying in one place seems foreign. All of the stuff in your apartment feels unnecessary and you'd rather just light out for the territories with a few shirts and a notebook. Traveling is definitely partly about seeing new places but it's also about seeing the old places in a new way when you get back.
Now I just need to write a script set in Asia so I'll have an excuse for someone to fly me back. And it sure as hell better be business class, that is one long flight.
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