Traveling Adventures

So the afternoon started off with a pretty simple plan: since I was already downtown I’d meet my chinese tutor at a cafe instead of my apartment. After the lesson I was to take the 96 bus home. But when I arrived at the bus stop there was no 96 bus and i didn’t recognize any of the bus stops listed for the buses that did stop there. I confirmed with a stranger that the 96 bus did not stop there. It was in this conversation that I came to realize I didn’t know the name of the place I wanted to go (I only knew how to recognize the characters). I also realized I had no cell phone. I also realised I had no map. All I knew was I wanted to go basically northish. Without knowing the name of where I wanted to go even a taxi wouldn’t help. I remembered those famous words from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “Don’t Panic”. I went to search for a place that sold maps. First store said that there was a store up that way that sold maps. They also said something about lights and “do you see it?” but I didn’t quite understand it all. After asking a few store clerks along the way I got to the map store and bought myself a map with bus routes on it. I had my current location pointed out to me on the map and asked them the best way to get to Beijing Lu (a major street that leads to my apartment). They suggested I take the 85 bus and that the bus stop was just a little bit that way. Well I must have missed the stop while walking or misunderstood them or both because after about 10 minutes walking I realised I was about a 10 minute walk away from the map store in the direction opposite to where I wanted to go. So a 10 minute walk back and a 10 minute wait for the bus and and a short bus ride later I arrived at Beijing Lu. There I was able to recognize my stop on multiple bus routes and went home. I think it is worth noting that despite the fact that I basically wondered around aimlessly for at least an hour more than was necessary I was pleased as punch at being able to succeed in this adventure. When I spoke Chinese, people understood! So I got back to the apartment complex only to realise I couldn’t remember which room I was in. I guessed building number 7, dan number 2, room number 201. Alas, I now realise that the it is building number 7, dan number 1, room number 202. After an awkward conversation with the residents of the wrong apartment number, I headed to the nearest internet cafe and checked emails to find the real address. See, having a terrible sense of direction and a poor memory will make you resourceful. Anyway, the minimum time you can buy is 1 hour so I’m spending this time writing this blog. Hope you enjoy it.

-Brit

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After enduring a week of humidity and heat in Guangzhou, we decided to move Kunming up our schedule in order to escape the smoldering heat! It was definitely one of the best ideas I’ve had all trip. The weather here in Kunming is amazing, everyday it’s been a balmy 23-25C, and although it’s rainy season here, this past week there’s only really been 2 crazy rain storms. 

Another thing that I like about Kunming is how inexpensive their flowers are. Back in Canada I never let Brit buy me flowers because I found them really expensive for something that would last only a few days. Here in Kunming at 3 yuan for 9 roses, and the most gorgeous lily’s I’ve ever seen was 7yuan for 3 stalks (also totaling 9 buds). That’s a little over 1 CAD for a beautiful bouquet of flowers! I’m happy to say I now have very pretty flowers at my current place. (Pictures soon to follow)

Speaking of lodging, our current diggs are fantastic! We’re currently paying 100 yuan a night for the both of us, and we are living in a 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom completely furnished room. Complete with a washing machine, oven (which is VERY rare in China) and a flat screen tv, dvd and digital cable. Unfortunately, we will be moving out tomorrow morning due to new tenants moving in (one of the downfalls of not planning in advance). Fortunately, my dear friend Janahlee has hooked us up with a even sweeter deal, we’ll be living at her friends house for the next few weeks rent free! And his place is just as nice, although we will be gaining a new roommate. We’ll see how that pans out.

In other exciting news: Our friend Gordon from Canada will be joining us in Kunming in a few days. Technically, he was suppose to join us today, but only found out last minute he in fact required a visa to enter China (apparently he planned even less than us). So for the time being he’ll be stuck in Thailand for a few more days!  

That’s all the news I have for now. I’m hoping having easier access to Internets once we move will mean more blogging. 

Tags: Kunming
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I love Brussels! Brussels happens to be where the headquarters of the EU resides and because of this something particular happens with their hotel system: weekends are 1/2 price because all the bureaucrats go home on weekends. Which is really really lucky for us as we went on a weekend so we got to sleep in a four star hotel (a very nice one my I add) for less than the hostel in Amsterdam. We even had our own kitchen! Location was great too, we were right across from the EU building as well as near a beautiful park.

Another nice coincidence was we went right on the weekend that they had the jazz festival. They had free concerts in their grand market, this big square surrounded by beautiful buildings. It was quite the view, we pretty much spent most of our time there.

In terms of food Brussels also had some of the best we’ve had so far. Their specialties are: waffles, mussels, and fries. All of which I enjoyed very much!

Tags: food, WIN
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I’m currently in Guangzhou, it was quite an ordeal to get here. I’ve written a post in my iPod just for you guys but I haven’t had a chance to post it up. To make a long story short our flight was delayed.

Linda is getting a massage now so I (Brit) will hijack this post…

This time in China is very different than last time.  I understand a lot more of what is said but still don’t always understand what’s going on.  For example I went to get my haircut amd they started ‘massaging’ my arms.  I haven’t been in that much pain since my last massage in Kunming.  Was offered another chinese massage but fool me thrice shame on me.   I also thought my bathroom stories were done with.  I’ve made peace with the eastern squat toilet.  But no.  When staying at Linda’s uncle place I was confronted with a problem.  I knew that you aren’t supposed to flush toilet paper down the toilet but after wiping I couldn’t find the trash can.  What to do?  I decided to keep the paper in my hand and try to ask.  Holding toilet paper on the edges made it difficult to pull up my shorts, particularly with the open window right in front of me.  With my shorts on I tried to flush but there was no button, just a bucket of water.  I tried pouring water to flush but it didn’t work that well.  Anyway, my excellent chinese skills solved all. I yelled “help me” then ”toilet paper where put?”  “second question: how use water go?”  Amazingly both questions were understood and I learned private toilets can deal with toilet paper and that to flush takes a big bucket of water not a small one.  Having fun in China.  We’ll see if we post more in China or Europe.

Posted in China, Misadventures | 1 Comment »

Over the years I’ve had my fair share of travelling misadventures especially when it comes to air travel. We started out the day pretty alright in London, it was a lovely day, we packed up our stuff went and got some last minute presents for friends and family and were well on our way to China: our next leg of the trip. We even got to have a great Indian meal in London before heading to the airport.

I suppose the scheduled tube closures somewhat set the tone of the next 20 so hours of travel. Taking detours was simple enough although more time consuming than I would have liked. Next we boarded the plane, and headed towards our new destination: Beijing. The time difference and fighting for the armrest with my neighbour made sleeping rather difficult, but the movies kept me entertained ( I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised at how funny the Pink Panther 2 was; I did not enjoy pink panther 1!).

We landed in Beijing in pretty good time despite a late start due to runway conflicts. Taking my dads advice we proceeded to go find ourselves some tickets to Guangzhou. Unfortunately, unlike what my dad had promised I’d find, there were no discount tickets available ( it was rather expensive, 3500¥ for Brit and myself) nor was there a place to find/purchase SIM cards. No worries I thought, I got money on us and pay phones shouldn’t be hard to find. Both of the above statements are true, unfortunately to use the pay phones in the airport you need to first purchase a phone card. Cheapest one: 50¥. After asking to pay people to use their cellphones and getting rejected I was getting dejected. So after some fustrating moments Brit convinced me to pay the crazy overpriced 50¥ to call the GZ family. So I went to the machine to purchase the calling card only to be told it was broken! At this point, I was definitely getting pissed off. Is there really no way for people to call without a cellphone? And no way to purchase one either? (Brit notes: collect calls and using our caliing card from London also did not work) Luckily after some more tries some guy was nice enough to lend us a phone. So I proceeded to call the number my dad gave us, first number: no answer; second number: doesn’t exist. Damn, this is not working at all! Luckily I had my aunts number and it worked, alright! Our arrival time: 5pm. Only 7 hours after we landed in Beijing, not ideal but at least we can still make it back in time for afternoon dim sum and then catch up on some serious Zzzs.

As we are waiting we noticed that we were to have a delay in boarding, then a delay in taking off. And 15 minutes before we were supposed to land an announcement came on: “Due to poor weather conditions we are unable to land the plane. We will now divert the plane to Shen Zhen.” Gah! We ended up staying in Shen Zhen for 3 hours sitting in the plane waiting for clearance to go back to our original destination. A lot of people complained of hunger seeing as we left at 2 and did not get any food on the plane, in fact there were no food on the plane at all. The guy sitting behind us complained very loudly, we gave him some pita and he turned it down asking us for cookies! How rude! If he was so hungry he should be grateful for whatever is offered to him!

Anyway here is the story of our entrance in china. Hopefully things will smoother in Guangzhou.

Tags: delays
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Sorry that we have been so terrible at posting so far. Our Europe portion of our trip just finished and hopefully we’ll get to posting blogs about the second half. But in the mean time here are some pictures from that half of the trip:

Europe 2

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So Brit pretty much covered the gist of all the touristy stuff that we did in Amsterdam but I thought I’d also add my take on the place. (sidenote: unfortunately it seems that wordpress is having some issues. When I tried loading Brits post it stalled and his post was lost. Hopefully he’ll post it again soon.) I think Amsterdam along with Rothernburg were my two least favorite cities so far (although Paris is getting to be a close on making that list too). I think it could have been a combination of travellers fatigue, poor roommates lack of privacy, high cost of everything and poor weather. Despite all this there were some particular highlights (eating food from a wall, fries with peanut sauce, Kevin the tour guide).

When we visited Leilani in Heidelberg she was able to give us some tips of things to eat in Amsterdam. She mentioned eating fries from a cone (seems that things from a cone always taste better) and to try the various sauces that goes with the fries. Stay away from raw herrings and things will be expensive. So when we arrived the first thing I was determined to do was eat fries which we did surprisingly well having got off the bus before our stop and landing smack in front of Feebo. Feebo is a chain of fastfood stores that has food in their walls. It also happen to be the place to purchase these fried veal sticks (another recommandation from Leilani) think pogo but much better and not on sticks. Having filled our tummies with yummy we headed to our hostel. When we arrived we got a pretty nice room on the third floor and found out that breakfast was included in our room price: Sweet! Unfortunately, we also discovered that Internet was 3€ an hour or 10€ for 5. The cost of being connected is high in Amsterdam (actually it’s rather high in all of europe if you want to use a computer)!

Our first night in Amsterdam was rather uneventful, we stayed in and slept pretty much after exploring our immediate area which consisted one of the big parks in amsterdam (Vondelpark). We also took that opportunity to post up the first batch of pictures that you see on our blog. The next day, we met our new roomates for the next 5 days: the dreaded computer junkies. These two guys were one of the main reasons why Amsterdam was such a dud for us. Trying to start a conversation with them was like pulling teeth, they pretty much stayed in the room the entire time (5 days) there watching American tv shows and eating at burger king. The worst part was they were mathies and cs students at U of T giving a bad name to geeks everywhere! The worst part was they were quite self congradulatory on their saving money tactics (eating fast food and not going to museums, etc). It was really fustrating for us to see these guys who paid so much money getting to Amsterdam and on lodging (60€ a night) just to do the exact same thing they would have done back home then congratulating themselves for saving money.

Not helping was the fact our hostel seemed like a hot spot for school groups. The hostel atmosphere where you can just hang out and meet people didn’t seem to be there and that was a huge disappointment since we had really enjoyed that aspect at our last hostel. 5 days of not feeling like we could wind down was definitely stressful and it totally showed in the way Brit and I interacted. Still I was really proud of the way we handled it though, and on our last night in Amsterdam we found ourselves in a Ben and Jerrys eating crepes and waffles and chatting. Who knew all it took was sitting in a corner booth?

Now for a female take on the red light district: they have a lot of sketchy looking people (that were not prostitutes) which made the experience rather uncomfortable for me. I was definitely glad that I was in a tour group even if the tour itself was a bit of a dud. The girls themselves were also a bit disappointing: they were all wearing regular underwear/ bras, not a lingerie in sight and looking rather bored. I’d think that one would make more of an effort to entice customers. After the tour and our dessert break Brit expressed how he wanted to to back to the red light district to get a better feel of what it’s like (i.e. Not in a tour group with your fiancé); being the totally trusting fiancé that I am I let him go back all by himself at 11pm. Just in case his stuff gets pickpocketed though, He left with only the key to our hostel, bus tickets to get there and back and 10€ in case he gets really lost and needed to take a cab ;). (Brit’s note: I did get lost again) According to Brit, his lone adventure garnered him a few more come hither looks from the girls; but you’ll have to ask him for the details.

At the end of the trip I was definitely looking forward to going to Brussels the land of chocolates and waffles.

Tags: food, roommates
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