Before the trip, I'd already rehearsed a lot of ways it could go wrong: being suspected, treated differently, seen as a nuisance. A few small moments later, reality didn't follow the script I'd written. But I'm not ready to draw a conclusion from that either. "It wasn't as bad as I thought" is just another judgment built on a handful of experiences.
After the trip, what remained was not only photographs and memories, but also a detailed record of spending. This article revisits a trip to Japan in June 2026 through its expenses, covering everything from transportation, accommodation and dining to shopping, payment methods, discounts and tax refunds.
Somewhere along the way, I realized that many of the standards I'd always taken for granted had quietly become the yardstick I measured myself by. Marriage, family, what a man is supposed to be, and the growing distance between my life and those of my friends. I started questioning all of it — the whole script I'd been handed. Maybe knowing yourself isn't about fixing everything. Maybe it's about sorting out what you actually believe from what you've simply heard too many times to question. And then getting on with life, bugs and all.
Most people's first program is Hello World. Mine came late, and at a rough time: in 2015, jobless in Chengdu with nothing to hold on to, I got a local website up and running. For a moment, I knew I could make something. But staring at those two words night after night, I also learned that getting a system to run and knowing what you want from it are two different things. I still don't have an answer to that second question.
This is a complete deployment log for a personal website: I built a trilingual (Chinese/English) blog at zero cost using the fully managed stack of Astro + Supabase + Cloudflare Workers. The article has two halves — the first is a from-scratch deployment walkthrough you can follow to get an identical site; the second is nine real pitfalls, each with its cause and fix. The core selling point: zero ops, publish-and-it's-live, CNY 0 a month.
