Seeing Taylor Swift from Zone 4
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Getting Taylor Swift’s Era Tour concert was highly competitive if you wasn’t aware of that yet. We were trying to affordable tickets at So-Fi stadium in LA, but failed. Luckily, Taylor added a new date for unlucky fans like us, so we were able to get two 50 dollar tickets at Zone 4 of So-Fi stadium. How far were the seats from Taylor Swift? The answer is far enough that you wouldn’t want to pay more than 50 dollars. Still, So-Fi is very equipped. Their huge screen around the stadium made us feel so close to the stage. 3 hours went by so fast!
Once we arrived in SAN, we took a train to our friend’s house in San Diego. Tonmai and Fai are Poy’s friends since he went to Scripps research institute for his Ph.D. They took us to several places such as La Jolla tide pools, Tacos stand, and Tonmai’s workplace which is next to the ocean.
We were then headed to LA to stay at the royal century hotel to see Taylor’s concert on the next day. When the day came, we wore our Taylor t-shirts, friendship bracelets, and heart-shaped glasses (all of these were Poy’s idea). We then went to Inn-n-Out to fill up our energy before the concert.
The concert were held at So-Fi stadium, which does not look so big from the outside. However, on the inside, it can serve up to 70,000 people. This is because the stadium was expanded in a more vertical direction instead of the horizontal direction as in a traditional stadium. The opening singer on August 8, the day we went to, was Gracie Abrams. She was so charming! Then Taylor Swift walked in and people started screaming out of their lungs. The show went by so fast that we couldn’t believe it was 3 hour long!
Not only that we went to see a good concert in this trip, we also got to see Poy’s friends in California. Waan also came see us on the last day and brought us to her favorite northern Thai food spot. She even brought us very close to the Hollywood sign. We were so grateful for our friends who let us stay with them and treat us with good food.
This trip was part of Poy’s trip to Champaign while he was studying at Oxford. He stayed in Champaign for a month to write a thesis. From time to time, we made a short trip to places near Champaign. We also got to pick apples at the Curtis apple orchard before he flew back to England to finish his Ph.D.
After we found out that there are some flights from Willard (a regional airport in Champaign) that are inexpensive, we started flying out from here instaead of Chicago. We got a really good price of plane tickets to Seattle, so we decided to go to more national parks! The two parks that we visited were Mount Rainier and Olympic National Parks. We thought about going to North Cascade as well, but the time was limited so we planned to visit there next time. Visiting these two popular national parks in the fall was such a good choice–less crowd, nice weather, and fall foliage!
Midwest surprisingly offers us many national parks to visit all year round. One of the national parks near Illinois is the Mammoth Cave National Park in Cave City, Kentucky. We rented a car from Champaign and drove around 5 hours, excluding small stops in Indiana. We had never been to Kentucky before, and we believe that not many international students had been there. Plus, this was the first time we visited a cave in the US, and we start with the world’s longest known cave system!
We’d been thinking of visiting South Dakota to see Mount Rushmore and Badlands national park for almost a year. Then an opportunity came when one of our friends gave us a buy-one-get-one-free coupon from Delta. We did not hestitate even a bit in buying two tickets for a round trip from Chicago to Rapid City, SD. Although it was an impulsive trip, we had a lot of fun observing the wildlife in the great plains of South Dakota and North Dakota.
Although Poy graduated from the Scripps-Oxford joint Ph.D. program in Biochemistry for half a year and already started working at UIUC as a post-doctoral researcher, his graduation ceremony was held way later in May 2024. His family also came from Thailand to attend his graduation ceremony in San Diego. We then spent over a week afterward traveling around the west coast, including California, Arizona, and Nevada. It was my first time (and his family’s first time) doing a road trip in the west coast. We enjoyed a huge variety of natural wonders that the west coast has to offer.