SFO — Blog — Healy Chen

Sheer convenience

Last evening, I had to pick up a friend from the airport. She was flying in from Singapore on a 15 hour flight. Foolishly she slept on the plane, which meant she will be properly jet-lagged today. From the looks of text messages in our group chat, she was still awake well into 3 o’clock this morning. Today will be rough for her indeed - the friend is already going back to work!

Before picking her up at the airport, we made a detour to the In-N-Out burger nearby in Millbrae. Whoever decided to put an In-N-Out there - right off the freeway exit just after the exit for SFO - is a genius. You can get the west coast famous In-N-Out burger immediately as you arrive into San Francisco. Grab your rental car, then cross the freeway. What, you want to take a bus there? Sorry, this is not Asia. Public transit doesn’t work like that around here.

Opposite to the Millbrae In-N-Out is the combined Caltrain and BART station. We were surprised and delighted to see a whole slew of apartments being built around it. Now that is convenience! I would totally rent a place there if where I work is accessible by train, either up into San Francisco, or further down the pennisula. I’d image those apartments will sell out quick, even in this climate of are we or are we not having a recession.

From the looks of the website, there will be shops and food places at the ground floor as well. As a person who lives two blocks from a major mall, I cannot overstate how valuable it is to be so close to these sort of amenities. Look at food: the reason I can make do with a relatively small fridge is because I can practically grocery shop at any time. The Whole Foods at the mall is open from 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM. I just buy what I need for that next meal - there’s no need to stock up.

This kind of convenience is worth everything. You’d have to pay me double for me to even consider moving out of my current living/working situation.

SFO vs. LAX

I am in the midst of planning for my usual summer holiday, and this year the destination is the isle of Japan. My friends and I are targeting the third week of July for this trip, and the obvious first order of business is to secure our flights. So on to Google Flights I went and executed a search for nonstop flights from San Francisco to Tokyo.

Sadly, the results were shockingly expensive.

For sure it was never going to be cheap flying to the other side of the planet, but nearly $1,800 for a roundtrip fare in economy is incredibly high – I can fly to Singapore for not much more. That fare is simply too rich for our group, especially considering Tokyo’s cost of living is world-famous for not being cheap in the slightest. We can’t blow a massive part of our budget on airfare alone.

An alternative plan, then: we dared to look at one-stop flights. As a general rule I’m wholly against routes with layovers, principally because it’s an enormous waste of time to be hanging out for hours at a transfer airport waiting for the connecting flight. Vacation time from work is already precious as is (thanks, America), so if I can pay a bit more to save time, I almost always do.

Unless of course the nonstop flight is untenably expensive. For the trip to Japan we found a one-stop flight for significantly less at $1,200 that involved a layover in Incheon, which honestly for me isn’t the worst thing in the world. I still hold fond memories the South Korea trip two years ago, so the opportunity to spend a bit time in that country again draws no protest from me.

My friends and I were all set on that itinerary, except I remembered that we are heading for Los Angeles only two days before the departure date, so what if we flew out of LAX instead? Once again to Google Flights I went, and to my utter surprise and indignity (at SFO), a direct flight from Los Angeles to Tokyo is even cheaper than our one-stop flight out of San Francisco.

What the heck!?

I understand there’s a larger Japanese population down south, but Japan is a popular travel destination for persons of all ethnic backgrounds, so I’m really quite miffed at why a direct flight out of San Francisco is some $600 dearer. In a childish protest sort of way, that’s not fair!

It’s an easy choice then for us to fly out of LAX. We’re still very ahead of the SFO-HND route in cost after accounting for the additional rental car down to Los Angeles and the flight back to San Francisco on the return. More importantly, we get a nonstop route over the Pacific, which is just the ultimate.

I can and will go back to South Korea at another date.