Oh yeah, that bit.

So, I was going to write about the last day of my trip in Xiamen, but it just isn’t that interesting. I’ll throw in a couple of pictures to discuss the few highlights, but there weren’t many.

Jing and I’s first stop on the itinerary for the day was the Xiamen University, which has the repuation of being the most beautiful of all university campuses in Southern China. It was a bit of a snoozefest to me, but the buildings were certainly cleaned up and spiffy, in the way that they strived for, anyway. The problem was twofold: A) there just wasn’t that much of the campus to look at, and B) the damn wide open soviet realist style paved walkways. They could really use some more plants there, the climate is perfect for having a very lushly terrascaped place. Anyway, here’s a few pictures:

The King Donut

So, the next day, Jing and I got up bright and early to get a bus to Yongding Village, or Yongding County, depending on how you want to translate it. I guess county works a bit better, its not just one small village.

There’s one distinctive thing about Yongding county, and that’s the legacy left behind by the Hakka ethnic peoples who live in the area. The Hakkas were a pretty mobile people, and live over a vast swathe of East Asia, going as far south as Singapore and as far east as Taiwan, and their language is variously referred to as Hakka, Minnan (literally means “People of the South”) or Taiwanese, although only Taiwanese people (who are mostly not Hakka) call it Taiwanese.

A Taste of the Old World

So, the last trip took in China that I have to write about, aside from ones from the beginning of the year for which I’ve lost all pictures, but might be able to get around to sometime 4 or 5 months from now, was a trip I took during the spring to the province of Fujian, with the purpose of visiting three locations: Xiamen, Wutaishan, and Yongding Village.

I never actually got to Wutaishan, so this instead will just be about Xiamen and Yongding.

Onto Some More Rocks

So the next morning, I got up and ready to go to Yangshuo. I went to the cafe area of the hostel and ordered a sandwich, which was disappointing in the way that Western food made in Asian hostels usually is. Ya Ya, the girl I had agreed to go to Yangshuo with, also got up at the right time . . . I think at about 9:30am we set out for a bus to Yangshuo. It would be a short ride, but I did my best to make it horrible by allowing her to continue to talk to me about Taiwan.

A Few More Trips

I’m sitting now as I type this in the port of Mawei, a special district in the Chinese city of Fuzhou, located just across the straits of Taiwan. In approximately one and a half hours from the time I’ve started writing this, I’ll be aboard that boat, heading to Taiwan, and leaving China behind, for who knows how long.

This means a couple of things. First, it means that over the next couple days I’m going to crank out a couple of blog posts about previous travels that I haven’t yet covered, and maybe another couple of shorts about Shanghai.

A Trip Down the Thames . . . in Shanghai

A couple of days after the American Dream fiasco, I set off in the direction of yet another strange part of Shanghai that I had read about online. Only technically located within the administrative district of Shanghai, there was a housing development project in whats honestly another town, called SongJiang New City, where the community is designed to look as though it were old traditional England.

Yeah, you read that right. London in the suburbs of Shanghai. I can feel the eyes rolling now, and trust me, I did the same.

Breaking Into the American Dream

So, a few weeks ago, my former roommate Jillian Corey came to visit for a weekend. She was one of my three roommates from the first semester; although she went home for the Chinese holiday break during the month of February, she came back to China in March, but this time to Beijing, to pursue another semester of study. Finally she came down to visit, and amongst other things, we had one particular goal, which was to go break into the American Dream.

SMP, Shanghai's Barren Skatepark

So, you'll scarcely be able to find any information online about this place, although it does have its own website. Shanghai is home to the world's biggest skatepark, supposedly. Considering how there's no information on it on wikipedia, and its own website seems to have been updated last a couple years ago, I wouldn't be surprised if the record has since been broken.

Into the Expo

Its taken long enough, I know, but at last I bring you the expo post. I finally went to the Expo 2010 in Shanghai this week, and here I’ll share with you my impressions of the site and the event.

Some of you reading this definitely know of the expo, a few might actually know what it really is, and maybe one or two of you have actually been there. For pretty much everyone else, here’s some background information:

Also known as “World’s Fair”, these expos have their roots in the London Great Exhibition of 1851.

Everyone Loves a Model

Or at least, everyone in China loves BEING a model.

In truth, I should have quite a few more pictures to support this story, but I've since discovered that a good number of the ones that were relevant were way too washed out; also, if anyone can tip me on how to embed video into these blog posts, I can put up a couple of those also.

Anyway, so, roaming around Shanghai, if you go to any of the "nice" parts of the city, you have a better chance than you could ever expect of stumbling across a modeling photo shoot. Recently, a good friend of mine from San Diego, a guy named Nathan, came to visit for two weeks, and despite the fact that I've already been experiencing this phenomenon for about a full year, it was nevertheless amazing just how many models we came across. Almost every day, we saw at least one photo shoot.

Not Exactly Chingrish, but...

So, here's another simple picture story.

China is also a land of many stores that feature English names, for reasons that escape any notion of logic. I find them in places where the number of English-speaking Chinese people is almost nil, but even in a place like Shanghai, there aren't that many. Nevertheless, they probably think it helps branding somehow, making it seem classier or more international. Whatever.A lot of the time it just ends up sounding weird. On with the pictures!

Finally, an episode of Chingrish

This has been a long time coming. It won't be the last entry I do about funny signs in Asia, that's for sure. Most everyone knows, or at least has heard of, the suspicious translations to be found in Asia, so here I am to show you some of the gems I've come across!

A New Era Continued (featuring the impossible)

As I'm sure many of you know, China is a place of remarkably fast-paced progress and development. Of course, it doesn't hurt that the place was close to a barren wasteland a few decades ago. Double digit growth, toppling Japan for #2 GDP in the world, blah blah blah.

The truly important story here is that thanks to their disregard for reality, China can pull off the impossible. You know the old Douglas Adam adage about throwing yourself at the ground and missing? Think along those lines. If you don't know something can't happen, then who says it won't?

A New Era Continued (featuring bears)

So, I'm going for a different feel for a bit.

I've still got some long form stories within me to tell, but those are on hold. In fact, I'm working on writing them also, but I'm writing various things.

For the time being, I'm going to start doing roughly a post every day about some smaller topics, usually involving one picture and a small story. I know this is actually pretty typical of blogging for most people, but it runs against mostly what I've done so far, so to me this is micro-posting.

The End of This Road

To be honest, my next couple of days in Vang Vieng were mostly repeats of the same, but with the British kids instead. We played around in the water a lot more; I hardly drank at all, except for taking some of the radioactive snake whiskey shots just for kicks. Instead I just subjected myself to the cruelest of water punishments my body’s ever handled, and pushed myself more and more; I think, ultimately, the biggest drop I took was about 20 feet or so into the water, which was pretty wild. I would love to go back and push myself some more; who knows when Laos will call me back.

Vang Vieng Some More: The Day Out

So, the day everyone was leaving, I went and rented a bike, and was deadset on just riding and seeing whatever was see-able. I hopped on and gave it a trial run, and rode around the small town a bit, seeing Evan before he left, and hung out with him for a little until his van showed up. I also did a bit of translation for the “front desk”, such as it was, at his guesthouse, between them and a prospective Chinese client. The Chinese person didn’t speak English, let alone Lao, and the Lao employee didn’t speak Chinese, so I moderated between them and got the guesthouse a client, in the end. I should have gotten a commission!

Vang Vieng Rock City 2: Rock Harder

Currently I write this while cruising in a taxi, with the glare of the sun upon me I might make a few extra typos in the first portion of this, so please give me your leniency!

So, the morning after my caving and kayaking trek, I met up with Evan to get breakfast. Another well-documented phenomenon about Vang Vieng is its ample restaurants aimed entirely at Westerners that have tons of televisions set up, upon which they show endless reruns of Friends. There’s a couple of restaurants that decide to mix it up with some Simpsons, and I saw one showing Family Guy.

Vang Vieng Rock City

So, Vang Vieng. This place needs a bit of an introduction. Ten years ago, it was on no one’s radar. Something changed. It got listed in Lonely Planet, for one reason and one reason only: tubing.

Fleeting Moments in Vientiane

So, first things first on this morning, I visited JoMo Cafe for some more bread eggs and bacon, and coffee, then I hopped straight onto a bus to go to Vientiane. It was a pretty good sized bus, and truth be told, the ride was super uneventful. In fact, my entire entry about Vientiane is going to be pretty short, as I didn’t do very much at all.

Tour de Luang Prabang

Picking up right where we left, off, a boatload of people and I had just landed at the river docks of the UNESCO World Heritage site of the town Luang Prabang, which is a sleepy town lying at the confluence of two rivers, one being the Mekong River, and has a ton of old school French colonial style architecture, particularly in the area designated as that heritage site. We weren’t there for more than thirty seconds before touts started trying to grab us to take back to whatever guesthouse they worked for.

All Hands Off Deck

So, I woke up on a quiet early Friday morning for my last bit of time in Thailand. I had already packed up the night before, so I was ready to go. I shifted to the front of the guesthouse balcony, took the pictures that I posted of the river in the previous blog post, and waited. I got up extra early, but not too terribly much so... soon enough, though, the other people who had booked this same boat showed up. From this guesthouse, there was three people. One was an older lady named Julia, from the UK, and then two younger guys, one named Kristian (also from the UK) and the other named Mark, from Switzerland.

The four of us were put on a tuk tuk and taken to a place to get photos taken to be ready for the on the spot Lao visas we’d be getting in a short time from now. I started getting to know the three of these people at that point, but only in a very casual way. It was still too early to really get to know a person. I’ll have none of that until after noon, thanks.

Three Visa-on-Entry's in 16 hours.

My days in Thailand were numbered. I headed north, to the town of Chiang Rai. I was only going to be there a day, then move on to Myanmar/Burma if it was possible. Nothing’s ever certain with Burma, so I wasn’t staking my entire travel plans on it, but I made my way up there anyhow.

Two More Days in Chiang Mai

So I woke up the next day, and got ready to do . . . something. Actually, this was set to be a good day. I had a few things planned for the day. The first of them was to go to a nearby temple on a mountain top, with my new friend Hannah. This temple is called Doi Suthep, and you really have to take a saengthaew (the name of special pickup truck taxis in Thailand) to get to it.

Chugging towards Chiang Mai

Early enough, I found myself yet again in Bangkok. I wouldn’t have any time to enjoy it, though, as I was going to try to make it as soon as possible to this one old, archaic airport that’s mostly used for domestic flights. My plan was to make it from Phuket to Chiang Mai in significantly less than the 24 hours it normally takes by train, so I thought a nice halfway solution would be to train to Bangkok, then fly from there. Being the quintessential hub, the prices would be cheaper anyway . . . it looked like it was going to work out nicely.

A Spell In Phuket

Its 4am on a Monday morning, and I just can’t seem to get myself to feel particularly sleepy at all, so I figured I’d add another installment to this travel blog. I’ve made a promise to knock off at least three days of travel time in blog writing every week here, and hopefully I’ll be able to go even a bit faster. The irony is that this installment right here will probably be three days in one go, but all the better. And sorry, no pictures this time.

Climbing Krabi

So I got up again, this time pretty early on, to try and catch my ride to the day’s fun of climbing. The van was a bit late picking me up, but not late enough for me to get a solid breakfast anywhere nearby, so I hopped in with a bunch of other people who were all just barely talkative. I was pretty tired, actually, so I mostly kept to myself at first, shutting my eyes to catch a little more rest.

and on and on

Anyway, where last we left off, I had departed Yara and Bangkok towards the bluer pastures of southern Thailand, specifically for the city of Krabi.

On to the most innuendo-rife city in the world

A scant few hours after I left Hong Kong, I touched down in Bangkok. The flight was pretty uneventful, aside from the weird whining kid next to me, who apparently pissed his pants or something while I was asleep, forcing his mother to awkwardly wake me so she could go clean him up, as well as fetching a wallet that I spotted another guy had left behind before leaving the airline.

Other than that, I made my way to the end of the line at the airport, and made my way through yet another immigration and customs department with little trouble. From there, I made my way straight to an airport express bus that would take me straight to Khao San Road, a backpacker’s haven in Bangkok, where I’d look randomly for lodgings. I was pretty much the first on the bus, and took a seat close to the door so I’d have an easy way out when it came time. Eventually, the bus was fully packed.

Canto-town

Currently I’m sitting on an island off of Thailand burnt to a crisp thanks to the harsh sun here, so I thought I’d take the day to catch up with a bit of my traveling.

And so it begins, again

I left just over a week ago from my comfortable life in Shanghai to explore Southeast Asia for the next month, as I have a decent break between semesters.

My plan was to go to Vietnam first, and by train. Long story short, that didn’t work out, for a variety of reasons, mostly relating to visa issues. But, it wasn’t too big of a deal. In any event, my first step was to take a train from Shanghai to Shenzhen, several hours after celebrating my friend David’s birthday party.

The End of Days

Sometime after Christine and I had slinked off to bed, maybe an hour later, Jill, Lauren, Sarah, and Ariel left to get going for their plane back to Shanghai. They never did pay for that room, the tightwads! (Just teasing)

So when the rest of us woke up, it was decidedly more mellow. There was only four of us to worry about anymore, which meant that at any given point in time we would still only need a maximum of one taxi. Soon enough, we wouldn’t even be four, as one of the first things we had to do was take Jing to the train station so she could start going back home to her town of Shenzhen (I say town, but it has something like 15 million people living there).

Back at Cloudland, or, Resolution (no pictures, and short)

Our last morning in Dali was a short, simple and sweet one.

Dallying in Dali

So we woke up to another day, another dollar in Dali. Group B, the group leaving this day, were going to try to go to Erhai Lake to see cormorant fishing, or something like that. To do so, they were getting up pretty early, the rest of us were getting a milder start to our day so that we could further enjoy the rest of the day.

Dali Days (no pictures)

So we got up in the morning, after sleeping hard in the wake of the Gorge. We weren’t really in a rush to get going, so some people did a bit of last minute shopping in the Lijiang area, getting scarves and such. I looked around for one that I thought my mom would like, but the shopkeepers would only give me foreigner prices, and wouldn’t bargain down at all, so I gave it up, though I was able to find one cheap scarf that I thought would look good for myself. Aside from some Tibetan prayer flags I had bought at the marketplace in Shangri-la, these were the only souvenirs I had purchased so far.

Running the Tiger Leaping Gauntlet

We had another early start to the day.  I think we got up at about 6am or so, and we were going to get a van at 6:30 that had been arranged by Mama Naxi to get to the Gorge.  It would take about 2 hours to get to the North tip of the Gorge, so this would let us get a start by 8:30, 9am at the latest, which should give us plenty of time to get through before sundown.

Getting everyone out of bed was easier said than done, but it didn’t take too long to rouse the troops to get gathered up.  Mama Naxi was actually awake this time, which I was a bit worried about, since she had failed to do the same just the previous morning.  This time, though, there was money in it for her, so naturally she was up and at ‘em.  She was gloriously dressed in her PJs, and had no idea where her driver was.

Lijiang at Your Leisure

Surprisingly, even though the events of the previous night/morning had left me with a scant amount of sleep, I felt good and ready to go this morning.  Maybe it was that shower that was the first in almost a week? In any event, we got everyone up relatively early, and most of us kinda wended our ways for the day.

On the Road Again, Just Can't Wait to Get On the Road Again..

The bus ride from Shangri-la to Lijiang was kind of enlightening.  It was a bit strange, knowing we had passed all of this scenery once before, but having been asleep prior, so seeing it anew for the second time.

There weren’t a lot of memories from the ride itself, I tried to doze off through as much of it as possible, using Christine’s shoulder and the window beside me alternatively as headrests, and mostly failing. The first memory I have, distinct, after getting on the bus, is getting off it at a terrible rest stop.

As was usually the case, this meant ice cream for me.  For once, it mean ice cream for people other than me, too, and a good amount of stretching for everyone.

Soul Searching in Shangri-La pt. III

Sorry, two weeks of shoddy internet activity plus sharing my computer with some friends while they worked on their finals prevented me from being able to keep tearing through this stuff.  Now, though, almost everyone I know in Shanghai has returned, more or less, to the United States, and I therefore have far too much time on my hands.

So, we woke up on Sunday.  I guess the shocking events of the previous night wiped me out, as I actually did manage to get enough sleep such that when I woke up, it was all systems go.