My Life in Words

DAY 31: we arrived in Bali the night of day 30. Our first 3 nights were in Ubud, which is in the middle of the country. It's not a beach destination; more of a country side retreat. Our hotel is very nice and a very good deal. We paid for 3 nights and the cheap price included an airport pick up, daily breakfast and a 90 minute massage for each of us. The room is nice (with a view of rice fields) and there is a nice pool. Anyway, day 1 (of 10 in Indonesia) was spent exploring Ubud. We started by walking though the monkey forest which is right by our hotel. There were so many monkeys everywhere. At first it was kind of cool....and then one attacked me. I was walking along, minding my own business, when it jumped onto me. It scared the shit out of me. After that, armed with the knowledge that the monkeys might jump at me at any time, the monkey forest was no longer fun. In fact, it was scary....especially when we came across about 20 monkeys having a bit of an orgy (which in turn led...

DAY 23: chris and i started the day at an internet cafe uploading pics and watching the stupid Canucks lose. Good to see the Sedins playing so well though.... Once the score got to be 4-1 for the kings, we gave up and went to an outlet mall by the airport. Nothing too special, but it was something to do. At this point we had spent so much time walking around the city that we needed to get away. There was some cable cars that you could ride up a mountain and at the top was big Buddha (of course...) but the line was too long so we passed. Craig arrived in the evening looking very hot and tired. After some room reorganization we dragged him out for dinner at an Irish pub, where we had the most expensive beer of the trip to date. I guess they figure the Irish will pay whatever it takes for beer and potatoes, so the prices are excessive for both. Oh well. DAY 24: by this point I was getting pretty tired of hong kong, but as Craig needed to see the city, i re-did a number of the key attrac...

DAY 18: our last day in china was quite dull. We woke up in the tiny town of Longji and had to kill most of the day (eating, interneting and card playing) before getting a late afternoon bus back to Guilin. Longji is in the mountains, and it was raining and foggy, so the bus trip was pretty sketch. Thankfully we had a private coach, and our driver was really good (and cautious), but it was a steep, high up, windy and foggy ride down. Once again, further evidence that the Chinese are not bad drivers. Once in Guilin we boarded an overnight train to Hong Kong. DAY 19: we arrived in HK in the late morning and had a bit of drama upon arrival. The Australian "anti-propaganda" woman and our guide got into some sort of confrontation. None of us witnessed it (because she spent most if the 14 hour trip away from the rest of the group in the dining car), but the gist is that she told our guide to "fuck off." He did not handle it well. Although she was wrong, as our tour lead...

Post number three.... DAY 12: as with day 11, this was an annoying day, because we had to make our way back to shanghai from the water town. The group was scheduled to take a 23 hour train to guilin in the late afternoon, but Chris and i decided to fly instead given than the ticket was cheap, and the flight was only 2 hours. This meant that he and I had an extra day and night in shanghai. We went to the shanghai museum in the afternoon. The best part was that it was free. The exhibits were ok, but there was nothing too exciting..... Mostly just a lot of really old Chinese stuff (like pottery and coins and seals). I did enjoy that the early Chinese 'coins' were the size and shape of knives. I'm not sure I believe the historians are correct in assuming they were currency.....they looked like weapons. For dinner i forced Chris to go to a vegetarian restaurant....which turned out to be fantastic. Even I was a little skeptical about the "vegetarian sweet and sour pork...

Ok, post number two. DAY 6: we arrived in xi'an on the morning of day 6 after a 14 hour train ride from Beijing. As mentioned before, the trip was fine. The only problem was that we arrived too early in the morning; we were up at 5am to get off the train at 6. The hostel/hotel in xi'an was AWESOME. Free wifi, computers, comfy beds, great showers, a great location, a good restaurant and it's a cool heritagey building. We were are all pretty happy there. Xi'an itself seems pretty grey and dirty compared to Beijing, but I did like it; it's an interesting place. I guess after the olympics beijing really cleaned it's act up. Unfortunately every day in xi'an was quite smoggy so that probably also made things seem more drab. All my pictures are so grey. After checking into the hotel, we went as a group to the Muslim quarter, which is basically a market. It was interesting looking at all the stalls and weird foods. At one point we were at a stall with huge hunks o...