There goes another year!

2025 Wrapped

I typically find myself to be in quite the reflective mood during the holiday season. It’s hard not to! For me, it seems as if time itself slows to a snail’s pace regardless of its velocity a month or two prior. I think this is partly due to the “freezing” nature of December- code freezes at work combined with literal winter freezes. This time, however, I have a more-or-less finished personal website I can put my thoughts into. I figured I may as well make use of it and jot down some of my yearly musings, if anything just for my personal reference a year from now.

2025 was an interesting year, to say the least. It was filled with twists and turns alongside every corner, both in my personal and professional life. I would be lying if I said it didn’t make things quite difficult, but I’ve always generally welcomed surprises in life. To an extent, I can even appreciate the bad ones. My view is that life without any surprises is… boring, to say the least. Sure, ‘boring’ isn’t necessarily a bad thing and I even welcome it at times! However, if I had to choose between a boring life where I knew exactly everything that was going to happen (pre-destination?) versus one where I didn’t- I would choose the latter every single time.

Obviously, I’m not going to go into too much detail about some of the “surprises” 2025 threw my way so as to not reveal too much personal information. I can, however, go over some of the highlights that aren’t too… ‘deep’, per se. For starters, I was blessed enough to have the opportunity to do a decent amount of traveling last year!

I actually started 2025 with a trip to Colombia! It had been a couple years since I had visited, and I always make it a point to try and go back whenever possible. Unsurprisingly, I love visiting my country of birth for a variety of reasons. The food, music, people, and family makes it an irresistible travel destination in my humble (and bias) opinion. So when I had the sudden opportunity to visit for a week or so with my mother, I took it. This time, I got to explore the capital, Bogota, for a weekend or so. Before, I had only really stayed at the city for layovers, but this time I got to experience some of the sights (and flavors!) the city had to offer, which was extremely pleasant. Perhaps I should make a post featuring my favorite restaurants in the country… time to review my Beli!

The month after, I went to both Korea and Japan to celebrate my birthday with some loved ones! This was actually my second time in Japan, and I still find it to be quite the charming travel destination. Korea was also wonderful, and although I spent a few less days there, I quickly determined that I would eventually return for a future trip. My highlight of this trip was easily bathing with Japanese snow monkeys in an onsen at Jigokudani Monkey Park. It was one of those things on my bucket list that I always wanted to do, and thankfully I finally had the opportunity to do so!

This was the only monkey actually inside the hot spring that day- thankfully he was quite photogenic!

Other trips that year included: an impromptu trip to UC Davis (and then San Francisco), a somewhat-planned trip to Louisville for the ‘Louder than Life’ music festival, a visit to Orlando for Universal’s halloween horror nights, and last but not least, another visit to San Francisco which included a roadtrip to Los Angeles!

Now that I think about it, I can easily write up entire posts for each of these trips. But the TLDR is that this past year was a pretty good one for traveling, and I’m fortunate that I had the opportunity to go on these trips! Without a doubt I plan on checking out some other places next year, though there aren’t any concrete plans at the moment.

Besides trips, there were some really cool experiences I got to partake in 2025. I was lucky enough to be able to:

• attend KPOP star Jennie’s first concert tour “Ruby Experience” at Radio City Music Hall
• watch Star Wars Episode 3’s limited theatrical re-release with some close friends
• watch the highly anticipated horror movie ‘Weapons’ with friends on opening night
• see several of my favorite bands play and headline the ‘Louder than Life’ music festival

And many more things I can’t remember of the top off my head! Truly, 2025 was a pretty good year all things considering. It definitely had its rough bumps, especially towards the second half, but overall I can easily say it was a net positive. I don’t think it’ll be an easy year to top, but it’s definitely possible that 2026 can compete with upcoming events like a new Resident Evil game, a new season of Invincible, and some interesting concert tours to name a few things.

Anyways, I think I’ve blabbed enough about 2025. Perhaps I’ll return to this post later on to include a few more details (and maybe pictures?) for my own future reference. It’s easy to forget about some highlights, or forget when exactly they took place, so I can see these kinds of blog posts being somewhat useful going forward.

In terms of goals for the new year… I’m still figuring that out! There’s a few in mind that are more professional and personal in nature, so I’m not quite sure if I want to share them hear just quite yet… but maybe that’ll change in the future! For now, thanks for reading this!