Haikou, Hainan and the end of the year grind

Well, the countdown is on. We have 1 week until we fly home and then our time in China is over. It is a bittersweet time, on one hand we are ecstatic to go home and start our lives in Canada, but on the other, we are a little sad to say goodbye to China and our adventures in Asia.

We have been excessively busy once again back at school and wedding planning. The year is winding down, and that means that school is crazy.

We had a nice holiday in Haikou, which is in Hainan province where we sat by the pool and read books. It was pretty nice, we had a direct, return, flight from Wuhan to Haikou and the weather was gorgeous.

When we first arrived, we had quite a conundrum trying to find our resort. The taxi driver went to the wrong place, we had the wrong phone number and we drove around for a while trying to figure out where it was! I had a good five minute conversation with some staff people at a office building which happened to have the same name as the resort we were looking for. So we drove around, phoned a few different places, before finally driving a few minutes out of town to our resort! That was maybe the worst part of the whole trip – and to top it off, the taxi driver tried to overcharge us! At that point, we just didn’t care and were angry for getting the runaround. Luckily we had a door man at our resort who talked to the taxi driver and saved us from spending too much money.

From then on, we did as much relaxing as we could. We spent our first dinner at the resort enjoying some very expensive sushi and Chinese dishes. Our first night, we explored a little bit of the resort and the beach and got excited about doing as much nothing as possible. We were slightly nervous about the weather, but for the whole week the thunderstorms and rain stayed away for the most part.

The second, third, and fourth days were spent sitting out in the hot weather, reading books and enjoying snacks. It was awesome. Our resort was ridiculously empty (due to the fact that the holiday had yet to start for most people). So we pretty much enjoyed a slow couple of days to ourselves at the resort. We also took a resort bus into the small city of 1 million and picked up some groceries and snacks. It was pretty cool to be somewhere completely different from Wuhan, yet still in China – so we were able to see what China was like outside of one of the major cities of Shanghai, Beijing, HK or Wuhan.

Not a lot more to report as far as that trip went. We went for a walk down to the famed “Holiday Beach” where people covered up and enjoyed the sunshine. The city street was filled with poorer people pandering beach floaties, parasols, and swimsuits – complete with a rack to browse. We walked to Fu Shan Coffee club where I had a decent iced black coffee, and Julie had a coffee that had rotten whipped cream on it. It was kinda gross, but we were too relaxed to care too much about it. On our walk back, we got caught in a crazy downpour of rain, without an umbrella of course. See, wasn’t our vacation just so exciting?

Since then, school has been non-stop. We have been busy with reporting, final exams, wrapping up our classes and packing up our house and packing in our days/nights/weekends with anything else that we want to do before we leave for good.

A few weeks ago we met up with a local artist who painted some beautiful art for us and enjoyed a good afternoon tea ceremony. We learned a lot about Chinese tea culture and culture here in China as a whole. It was really cool to spend some time in a Chinese home and our friend’s home was a very cozy blend of old Chinese culture and the new modern Chinese culture. Of course, we taobao’d a nice tea set and gear so we can have our own tea ceremonies with people that we want to share with.

Julie did a girls’ weekend in Shanghai, and I was pulled along on an epic bachelor weekend to Beijing, where we indulged in delicious food, drinks and nonstop party. Julie bought a whole lot of great fake stuff in the markets and enjoyed some good times with her girlfriends here.

We also went go-karting at Guanggu square with a coworker for his birthday. It was crazy! We raced around with hardly any safety equipment and no restrictions. We were bruised and banged up all week because it was basically go-karts on steroids with bumper cars mixed into one. One lap, I got rear-ended and my helmet fell off! But, nobody stopped me, so I kept on karting with the wind flying through my hair. It was hilarious.

It is a little tough to think back to what we have done recently, I have neglected to update the blog in the past month or so because we have been going through a hurricane of work in this last month.

We can’t wait to put our feet back on Canadian soil, and our next update will be about adjusting back to Canadian life and comparing life here to life there.

Until next time!

 

Tristan

Bali! And the past month….

Apologies for the lack of updates. Perhaps you are dying to know what we’ve been up to for the past month.

Ready? The unfortunate answer is WORK. We love our school, but more often than not, we feel like we are working for the weekend. We put in long hours (at least 10 hrs/day), work Saturdays, and find ourselves with hardly any free time during the week. Believe what you want about teachers, but we deserve our vacations with how hard we work at work!

But, first I should tell you about Bali.

We were lucky enough to stay for 17 days in the sunny, cultural hub of Ubud. We absolutely loved it there – We stayed in a basement suite with a gorgeous view of a rainforest valley, an infinity pool, and rice paddies surrounding our little house. We had a scooter and we scooted the most incredible drives through Bali back roads with stunning views every morning to end up at any array of nice little coffee places where we enjoyed all kinds of different iced coffees, Americanos, coconut coffee, and Bali kopi (basically free floating coffee grounds in hot water). It was magnificent.

The rice paddies around the villa

View from the bedroom

Tristan got a puppy surprise in his coffee

Unlike our other adventures to different countries, our hugest objective in Bali was utter relaxation. We succeeded in this regard. We spent as much time as possible under the hot Bali sun. Just writing this, we wish we were back there now.

Taking a stroll down a side road after breakfast

Ubud is also the home of shopping and cultural goodies. Most days we woke up late, hung out in the sun for the better part of the morning, then scooted into town for lunch and/or dinner, accompanied by a bunch of shopping. It was Island time, all the time. We strolled around, not a care in the world, stress just rolled right off of our shoulders.

Artisans in Bali do it right. Countless trendy shops line the Ubud streets selling clothes, art, trinkets, 100% natural creams, Organic this and Free Trade that. It was definitely a hippie destination. However, mostly everything about Ubud is centralized around the Western EPL. This acronym was coined by us while we were there.

What is an EPL you ask?

I’ll tell you.

The EPL, or Eat, Pray, Lover (See the film titled Eat, Pray, Love starring Julia Roberts) is usually a North American/Australian or European single female of any age that has traveled alone to Bali in the hopes of “discovering” themselves. This could come from a recent divorce, an epiphany, or any crises that can span one’s lifetime.

We have literally never seen so many single women traveling in a single place. It was strange. Everywhere that we went, the EPL had infiltrated – it was insane to witness how a movie could change the course of a vacation destination so much.

One of the first major things that we decided to do was to drive our scooter down to the black sand beach of Komune Beach Resort, where we hung out in crazy basket chairs with our feet in the sand, listened to relaxing electronic music, and enjoyed delicious food and drinks while watching tons of people surfing. It was a great day and some of the best part was navigating our little Scoopy scooter down the Balinese back roads.

Hanging out at Komune Beach Club

The other thing about our little place in Bali, was that we were in the wilderness. We shared snacks or a bottle of wine on our little patio at night time, and we saw all kinds of crazy looking and huge insects, frogs, bats, and big lizards crawling all over the outside and inside of our place.

Big ass bug on the window

 

A huge gecko in the shower.

Our friend, the toad, hung out with us on the patio for about a week

One day we were heading down for a nice breakfast on our scooter, when “POP!” something happened.

We stopped the scooter and assessed the damage. The back tire was flat. Crap! So, we wheeled it back our house where we let it sit, while we figured out what to do with it. We had a nice walk into town, but having the scooter to get around was awesome, so we needed to fix it.

The next day, I wheeled it in the morning, way up the hill, to the mechanic shop. I was hot and sweaty, and expecting to pay big for this flat tire. 20 minutes or so later, I gave the mechanic 10,000 IDR (roughly $1 CAD) to fix it. Awesome.

The other amazing thing that we did was sign up for a cooking class with Paon Bali (Bali Kitchen in English). It was such a cool time. We were lucky enough to be the only two people there. We had a nice welcome drink of homemade lemonade while we learned a lot about Balinese culture and the dynamics of home life and why they do things the way they do. It was unreal. Then we went back into their backyard, had an awesome tour of their garden, looked out over the terraced rice paddy view, and cooked a feast of the best food that we enjoyed in Bali. We got to use the “Bali blender” which was basically a huge pestle and mortar, and we felt more balinese after we left! It was excellent, and we are excited to show off our Balinese recipe skills.

Making the yellow sauce in the ‘Bali Blender’

These are all of the ingredients we used at the cooking class. All fresh from their garden!

The finished product!

We suffered from another flat tire later on ($3 to replace the inner tire tube) and had a blast in Ubud. We went to a really cool dancing and music show as well. We just did too much stuff to talk about it all here! If you want to know more about it, comment below!

We went to Kuta (the main beach area of Bali) on the last night of our time there because our flight left back to Shanghai at 4 a.m. and boy were we glad to have stayed in Ubud. The traffic in Ubud was bad occasionally, due to tour buses coming in from Kuta, that absolutely slammed the tiny roads, but it was manageable. Kuta was a gong show – I was happy not to be driving around there, and when we went anywhere to eat, food and drinks were easily double the price of Ubud. Tourism has its drawbacks I suppose.

We had a nice last meal right up against the beach, hung out for as long as we could at the restaurant, then walked to the airport and flew back to Shanghai.

We had a one day layover in Shanghai where we stayed at a nice hotel, indulged in some room service (Our first time!) hung out in the sauna, and watched cheesy Valentines day movies on TV.

Valentine’s Day room service

We left to Wuhan the next day, and when we showed up to the airport, we couldn’t find our flight on the departures board. Hmm.. that was strange, but we thought nothing of it, and we went in signed in with China Eastern Airlines.

Turns out our flight leaves in an hour from the OTHER airport on the other side of town. NO!!!!

We are pretty good at this traveling thing by now, but this was probably one of our biggest mistakes that we’d ever made. Thank goodness that the woman at China Eastern was very understanding and helpful, and transferred our flight free of charge to another flight leaving to Wuhan later in the day from the airport that we WERE at. PHEW! Dodged a bullet there.

Once we were back in Wuhan it was essentially back to business as usual. Work was fast and fierce right away, and hasn’t slowed down at all. We had a BC ministry surprise inspection last week, where our school passed with flying carpets, we went down to Tailor street to get the wedding suits made up and paid for, and we also went to MoShan Scenic Area to get a glimpse of the blooming Cherry Blossom trees.

At the Cherry Blossom festival at Moshan Hill, East Lake

A wonderful day at Moshan Hill

We’ve booked our next trip to Haikou, in the south of China for our next one week vacation, so that should be very exciting. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Until then, here is an amazing video that Julie made about all of our travels so far:

Also, here is an incredible documentary about economics in China in which our city of Wuhan is the focus!

Keep your stick on the ice,

Tristan and Julie

Vietnam, Singapore and the Bali-Hai

Hi again friends and family

Happy Chinese New Year! It is 2014 and the year of the horse!

A billion people are traveling all throughout China to visit their families and celebrate the new year.
Thank goodness that we are not in China at the moment, as I’m positive that it is an absolute gong show. Wishing everyone there safe travels.

Julie waits in Kuala Lumpur airport.

Right now I’m lounging poolside at our villa in the town of Ubud, on the “island of the gods” – Bali, Indonesia.

But, much has happened since we left you last, so here is an update.

We visited Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. When we arrived there, the first thing that we noticed was the scooters and motor bikes. There were millions clogging up the roadways, and buzzing around like angry bees. It was insane chaos. The only plus was that the traffic behaved like it did in China, walk out slowly into the street and the traffic will flow around you.

A scooter parking lot view from our hotel.

Ho Chi Minh city is a beautiful place, streets lined with big trees, huge art installations in the middle of traffic circles, amazing old French colonial buildings transformed into restaurants and hotels, it has something for everyone. You can have a posh time at some of these places and spend a hundred dollars, or you can have a Bia Hoi (fresh beer) and some Pho (famous Vietnamese soup) at a street corner from a motorcycle vendor for $2.

We stayed in the touristy area district one, where most of the museums and places of interest are located. We were minutes away from the famed Ben Thanh market, which turned out to be no different from one of the pushy Chinese markets that we’ve seen all over Wuhan, Beijing, or Shanghai. We walked through the stalls filled with touristy junk and the vendors would call out at you and sometimes grab your wrist or attempt to slow you down

“Sir, lady! You want buy!?”
“Lady sir! Gucci? LV? T-shirt?”
“Sir lady! Buy coffee! You need souvenir?”
“Lady sir! Marijuana?”
“Lady sir, you need taxi?”

For some reason, every time we were addressed, it was as one person – the mysterious lady sir or often the sir lady. Very strange. We got pretty good at saying no thank you or just ignoring them.

We also did some visiting of Vietnam war sites. The first we checked out was the Cu Chi tunnels, which was a bit out of town but only $10 for both of us to do the whole half day tour. The Cu Chi tunnels were a brilliant underground network that the Viet Cong used to get around and kill the southern Vietnam army while staying hidden. It was really quite amazing to see how intricate the tunnel system was.

When we first arrived, we got to watch a video, which was basically anti-American that talked about life in the village of Cu Chi during the 1960s and how it was destroyed by constant shelling and Agent Orange, but the Vietnam people were strong and video recognized some child soldiers and other Vietnamese who were awarded for their bravery and killing Americans. It was all very jarring to see.
After that Julie and I had the chance to shoot AK-47s! That was pretty cool. Our photos of that are unfortunately stuck on our camera though.
Finally, we had the chance to crawl through the tunnels. They were dark and hot and very tiny, even though the ones we went through were enlarged for tourists. Afraid of getting lost and trapped 3m below the surface, both Julie and I didn’t make it the whole way.
It was an amazing yet solemn experience to walk through these old battlefields that had been transformed into a glorified museum. To see the US tanks that had been stripped after hitting landmines, demonstrations of the horrible traps that the VCs set up for people to step into and get impaled – it was brutal to imagine how many had lost their lives there.

The other war related thing that we did was visit the War Remnants museum. Besides the aircraft, tanks and boats outside, this museum was mostly photos and information. We learned a lot about the French Indochine war and the “American” war that we didn’t know about. It was horrific to learn about all of the things that the Vietnamese people endured and are continuing to endure as a result of these wars. We saw many a beggar on the street with deformities due to Agent Orange. You couldn’t help to do your best to empathize with their situation.
It is truly incredible what Vietnam has done to rebuild and rejuvenate their destroyed country after so many years of destruction.

The people were friendly and accommodating everywhere we went and we loved our time in Vietnam. I am guessing that at this point you are waiting for me to start going crazy about the food we ate. Yes it was good, I ate pho and spring rolls as often as I could, but what I will rave about is the coffee! Man they know how it is done here. Prepared in a way like we have never seen before, we enjoyed many ca phe sua da (coffee with milk and ice). Holy. You order this delicacy, and you get a small little espresso sized cup with some condensed milk in the bottom. On the top of your cup is a simple little contraption that makes drip espresso. When the water drips through the coffee grinds and into your cup, stir ‘er up, dump it into your tall cup of ice and enjoy cool, rich, chocolatey flavoured coffee. Absolutely divine on a hot and muggy Vietnam morning.

Julie enjoys some coffee.

I got my haircut by this dude!

After Vietnam we had a pleasant stopover in Singapore. What a gorgeous city, but wow is it unaffordable. We were reminded of Vancouver with the city’s cleanliness, excellent public transport, and prices. We only had one half day there, so we went down to the downtown core and lunched at Clarke quay where we ate delicious burgers. What goes great with burgers? Beer. Sure I’ll have a pint of…WHAT? 16 Singapore dollars ($15CAD) for a pint of the cheap stuff? They had deals for buckets of 5 for $56 or buckets of ten for $98. Singapore takes the cake for the most expensive booze we have ever seen.
Next we enjoyed a Singapore sling for $9 and overlooked the gorgeous boat quay and the amazing Marina Bay Sands resort (the one that looks like a floating boat that crashed on top of three buildings).

Thankful we weren’t in Singapore long enough to go broke in a matter of minutes, we were off to Bali the next day.

Our villa is located in the hilly Ubud, famed for its rice paddies and some book or movie or something about loving and eating and praying. It has been extremely relaxing and we haven’t done much so far other than “maxing and relaxing” as my fiancée so perfectly puts it. People are right, there is something about the island vibe here that puts you at ease and carries your troubles away. They call it the Bali Hai.

Bali.

So far we have scooted around through the scenic rice paddies, lounged by the pool, eaten three meals a day, shopped at plenty of boutique stores, and spent one day at a black sand beach where plenty of surfers ripped it up on the gnarly waves.

We have seen a crazy amount of single women here (we call them eat, pray, lovers) so if you are a single man of any age, looking for love, come here. Everybody is a super laid back, dreadlocks, granola, yoga, wholistic, wheatgrass, feelin’ the vibe, chilled out person. I am feeling right at home here, as if the city of Nelson were nestled here instead of Ubud. We have no worries.

Last night we celebrated our 6th dating anniversary with a dinner of duck overlooking a rice paddy field lined with Palm trees. It really is beautiful here.

I’ll update you more later, once we have done more in our time here in Indo.

Tristan

Lost and Clueless in Kuala Lumpur

We were not prepared for the modern metropolis of Kuala Lumpur after spending such a wonderful and relaxing time in Cambodia. It was jarring to make such a shift to, basically, a completely westernized city. The first day and a half were difficult, things didn’t go our way. As soon as we landed, I discovered that during the flight, the second pair of sunglasses that I had brought on the trip were broken. That sucked, but they were only $3, so not a huge loss.

Now, you must understand that KL is a huge, modern city with all of the amenities, infrastructure and transportation that you need in order to get around. That was great, it worked perfectly – if only we knew where the hell we were going. KL needs to heavily invest in sign making, as our most common memory of our stay here was us standing on a street corner trying to make heads or tails of our location. We took the KLIA ekspres bus and train into the city, but for such a well known and used transport method, no signs existed anywhere, we luckily stumbled upon a random kiosk after the info desk had pointed us in the general direction.
So that’s how we made our way into the city.
Great we are here.
Now where is the subway? We walked around and just followed the flow of people until we made it to the monorail. Thank God we were at the terminal station, because there are no announcements for where you are, which way your train is heading, and to boot, signs for the station you are at were difficult to spot as well!
Finally we made it to Bukit Bintang, the area where we were staying at. Once again, immediately after exiting the monorail station we got lost. A kind Malay man gave us some directions towards the street we were after which were, “you either walk through this mall to the other side, or go down these stairs.” Shoulda gone down those damned stairs. Fifteen minutes of walking around with our big backpacks on searching for an exit to the stupid mall, we finally exited into the underground parking lot. Great, this is even better. After walking around some more, we asked another hotel how to get to ours. Once again we walked through some shops and onto the street that we were supposed to be on. At last, Julie spotted our hotel. BRUTAL!!!
We checked into our hotel and went for some food. KL is famous for its delicious food, and we were excited to treat ourselves to some different cuisine. We walked down the street and sat in the first little Indian restaurant we saw. The food sucked. Could this day get any better?

Of course it could.

When we went back to our hotel, Julie’s bottle of coconut oil broke and soaked her nice shirt, her purse and she was losing the precious liquid which helps her hair stay less like a crazy frizz ball. Then, the tap didn’t have any water coming out at all. After a few frantic minutes, brown water started coming from the taps. Augh!
After that situation, we decided to go see the KL Petronas towers (the cool ones with the sweet skybridge) so we walked back to our monorail station. We paid the 8 RM without a thought, but when we arrived at the station where we were supposed to transfer…. Nope! You can either take a long multi transfer route through 3 subway lines, or you can exit here and walk 2 minutes to the next subway stop, pay again, and ride that line for 1 stop. Obviously we cut our losses and went for the latter route, but to get scammed by the subway system was a new one for us.

The Petronas towers were really cool, and we hung out in a beautiful park for an hour or two and watched the slick steel towers light up slowly before we went back to our hotel. Maybe this place isn’t so bad.

NOPE!

Our hotel was located on a bustling street food street called Jalan Alor, famous for its backpacker vibes and cheap street eats. We decided to give this a whirl. Stupidly, we ordered without looking at the prices, but we enjoyed a nice meal of curried crab, pad Thai (Danny, yours put this one to shame), and deep fried calamari. Ahh.
When we got our bill, we were surprised to see that our street food cost about $30 CAD. What?! It turns out that the crab was worth $25 (75RM). Feeling as though nothing could go our way, we finally went to bed at our hotel, conveniently on the corner of this street.

Or so we thought.

Also famous for this area are crazy bars and clubs and street performances. We lay in bed awake for hours being drunkenly serenaded by hordes of people who sounded as if they stood outside of our window. At this point we were ready to board a plane somewhere else.

The next day we felt a little better and thought it couldn’t get worse, so we walked down to a big mall called star hill and pavilion centre where there were plenty of cafés and shops to take a look at. This area became our go to over the next couple days. We did some shopping, eating and relaxing after our late night non-escapades.

Feeling like a bit of a change, we decided to go to the Kuala Lumpur Orchid Gardens to escape from the craziness and just relax for a bit.

Hey, let’s walk there, it’s not too far.

Bad idea. After 100m, we were lost again due to the complete lack of street signs.

We chose to take a taxi, that would be quick and we wouldn’t feel so tired if we walked the whole way. So we hailed some random taxi, got in, told him where we were off to, and thought nothing of it.

But his meter wasn’t on. We saw this, and said, “can you use the meter please?”

He said, “I can’t. It’s broken.”

Being the quick thinking and knowledgeable people that we are, knowing that taxi scams are rife in KL, Julie began yelling right away to stop the car.

“If you can’t use your meter, we’ll find someone else who will!”

Ta-Da! Meter works.

But, as if to get back at us for spoiling his scam, we think he took us a long and confusing way that just happened to go right through a huge cycling race that was happening downtown KL. That was the last time we took a taxi here.

The orchid gardens were great and we also enjoyed a nice walk back to our hotel from the gardens through the downtown which featured amazing Arabic inspired architecture (only 17 stops to check our map!). Finally, we had a delicious burger and beer at a place called the fuel shack.

Not forgetting our godawful sleep the previous night, and the fact that it was now Saturday, we stopped off at the closest pharmacies and spent the best 80 cents that we could have. Earplugs.

After a better and more restful night, we had another lovely breakfast at a cafe, and decided that we should visit the famous Batu caves. Many people had been talking about the caves and the tripadvisor site that we checked out suggested it, so why not? Should be cool. We took our confusing monorail two stops the wrong way, then switched and arrived at KL Sentral, the transport hub of the city. From there we took a squished commuter train to the Batu caves.

I am glad that we went there, but I will never return. Immediately after exiting the train, there were tons of people everywhere. It turns out that the Batu caves was a very old and sacred temple for an Indian religion that we weren’t familiar with. We saw all kinds of people with paint on their faces and foreheads, and many men and young boys with their heads shaved and covered in an orangey yellow paste. We walked through the crazy bazaar market selling food, knick knacks, and whatever, and made our way to the stairs of the Batu caves.

The first thing that we noticed was the litter. Never had we seen so much piled up all over the place, it was everywhere. Underfoot, in piles near people eating, trash bins overflowing everywhere, it stank horribly as you could imagine. I started forgetting about the caves and started snapping photos of the garbage. It was psycho, and we weren’t even at the cave entrance yet.
At the entrance, it was suggested that you remove your shoes and wear appropriate clothing to show respect for the cave temples. We decided not to do this as everyone was disobeying this rule, nobody was enforcing it, and we didn’t want to leave our shoes in the hundreds of shoes/garbage piles that were strewn everywhere that didn’t see foot traffic.
We walked up the stairs and watched people carry pewter jugs with offerings up to the caves and admired a huge golden statue of a god. Monkeys climbed everywhere and kids ran and played on the stairs.
Then we arrived in the caves. Once again, garbage everywhere! The scent was so bad because it was contained inside of the caves, there were more piles of it everywhere and people were selling all sorts of things inside. It was one of the strangest dynamics we’ve ever seen in regards to a religious site. If it is so sacred, why don’t you clean it up and keep it nice? It would have been wonderful had it been clean.

After seeing it, we rushed out of there, away from the bazaar (where I strangely spotted some Canadian 2 for 1 pizza signs…) and boarded the train back to the city.
We stopped off at the famed Chinatown Central market for some nice shopping, and Julie picked up some beautiful necklaces.

Finally we started getting something right. We ate dinner at a wonderful Lebanese restaurant called Al Amir, where we enjoyed all kinds of hummus, moutabel, shawarma and a lentil soup. I am drooling just thinking of it now. If you ever find your way to KL, check it out.

On our last day, we ate at yet another great cafe, and decided to take the hop on hop off tour around the city. That was pretty cool as we got to see some places we hadn’t really seen and get some ideas for where we should go. We saw some beautiful mosques (KL has a huge Muslim and Indian population! We were surprised too) the national palace, and a few other main sights.

At last, we ate our dinner at a Malaysian place called Bijan. Go there.

We were lucky enough to stumble upon some kind of staff meeting or group get together where they showed traditional Malaysian dances and culture while we ate our food. It was a great way to top off our slow start to KL. They did many nice dances, including some bamboo stick dance, sword and spear dances, and a blow dart dance where they popped balloons!
The food was amazing, we had some chicken with peanut sauce and stewed lamb in some wonderful curry.

Today we travelled through the brutally set up KLIA airport, and we will be arriving in Ho Chi Minh City soon!

Til next time!

Tristan

P.s. Sorry for the lack of photos, they are trapped on our camera!

Angkor What?

After a long couple of weeks filled with marking, final exams, report cards and two working Saturdays, we were more than ready to hop on a plane to Bangkok, Thailand. We left Wuhan on January 12th and flew direct to Bangkok, where we stayed one night in an airport hotel. We didn’t want to risk getting caught in the middle of protests and busy traffic so we promptly flew out of the country the next morning, to Cambodia.

We had a short, 4 day stint in Siem Reap and although quick, we really enjoyed our stay. We would definitely return to Cambodia. The people were so friendly, the sites were unlike anything we’ve seen before and the food was a nice relief from the typical Wuhan cuisine.

On our first day we became oriented with the touristy streets of the downtown, enjoyed some Khmer food and made plans for the following day. Our second day was filled with utter amazement. We were able to visit many ancient temples in the area, including Angkor Wat! We were picked up by our tuk tuk guy at 8 am, and, manoeuvring through the crazy streets, we came to our first temple, Angor Wat! I have wanted to see Angkor Wat ever since those good ol homeschooling days of grades two and three, when I learned about the 7 wonders of the world. We spent 5 hours of our day tuk tukking around and walking inside the 1000 year-old stone temple walls. It was definitely one of those “I can’t believe we are here” moments. The first temple we visited was Angkor Wat, the biggest and most impressive of the Angkor temples (there are tons of them!). It was amazing, and surprisingly, we weren’t barred from touching or climbing upon any of the structures! It was amazing to see the sandstone carved Bas-reliefs depicting scenes from battles which were fought 1000 years ago. They were so beautiful, our favourite was the way that they carved trees with leaves. The next temples we visited were Baphuon, Bayon and Ta Keo.
The first one we saw was Bayon, famously known as the temple of the faces. This one was very cool, we wandered through dark passageways and felt like explorers, until we got to the top level and saw hundreds of people walking around and taking pictures. The carvings on this temple were amazing too, mostly of day to day life in the Khmer kingdom, my trusty $5 book tells me. Baphuon had the most impressive approach, an elevated walkway over what probably was a flooded basin, but it was damaged a lot and pretty ruinous, except for the reconstruction they’ve done to save it. We climbed to the top of this one and relaxed for a few moments to enjoy the jungle scenery!
Lastly, we visited Ta Keo, which we thought was the overgrown by cool trees one, but it’s not hahaha. So we stopped for a quick pic, and kept tuk tukkin’ to Ta Prohm.
Ta Prohm is the temple with the overgrown trees, and when we pulled up, we were excited. We walked through a short pathway where poor and injured Cambodians were selling knick knacks and flutes, and shortly we were walking in the ruins of the temple. The first thing that caught our eye were the trees, they were massive! The temple was mostly in ruins, piles of beautifully carved stone were laying about and the huge silver trees slowly crushed the walls and towers of the temple.
Yes, this is the same temple made famous by Angelina Jolie and Tomb Raider! Pictures cannot do it justice, we tried, but this is something you truly need to see to understand and appreciate it fully. It was so peaceful and nice, but walking back to our tuk tuk, we were attacked by throngs of people selling tuk tuk rides, cool drinks, bracelets and anything else for $1.

Visiting temples turned out to be more exhausting than we had first anticipated so we planned to relax the next day and then hit the hay early. The following day consisted of getting coffee and breakfast at a nearby cafe called Common Grounds, which was delightful, sitting by the pool, and getting pampered by the magical hands of a couple masseuses at Devantera Spa.

Our last day in Siem Reap was unexpectedly amazing. We had heard from many locals that we should visit a place they call the Floating Village. It sounded interesting but we were not expecting to be blown away. We hmmed and hawed, but we were so glad we went.
We boarded our tuk tuk at 8 am and then took an 80 minute jaunt down the road. This was our first unexpected encounter. We had assumed that the village was a 15 minute ride away from the city. As we drove through the countryside and through a couple villages, we could not believe how different the villages looked from the city. We knew that Siem Reap had been built from tourism but we were not ready to see the vast spread of poverty in the surrounding villages. It was an eye-opener and it constantly reminded me of how damn lucky we are to be from Canada. Gratitude. It’s one of the biggest things I’ve embraced through travelling. We drove through small villages with dirt roads, rice fields and finally we stopped when the road did, and the ditch beside us got big enough for a boat to drive through.

When our tuk tuk came to a stop, we were met by a man who led us to his twelve-seater, wooden motor boat. We were surprised when we noticed that each set of tourists had their own boat and driver, instead of shared transportation. We boarded the boat that was squished between and behind many other vacant boats. It was impressive to watch the driver maneuver the large boat out from its parking spot and into the brown, muddy waters of the river. He took us down the river where we eventually came upon a few buildings – a police station and a school – built on stilts in the shallow banks of the river.

As we turned the next bend in the river, the magnificent village revealed itself. unlike any other village we had ever seen, there were houses after houses teetering precariously, supported by hundreds of raw wooden poles from the waters below. The village bustled with the day to day activities you could expect people to be doing. One man wielded an axe, improving his colourful house on stilts, many people were fishing using nets in boats, and children laughed and played while paddling in boats or swinging from pole to pole. It was magical to experience, the strangest feeling to be removed from the village and to watch it objectively. Some of the children waved, and when we waved back, they started dancing Gangnam style! It was very funny, and we felt a little connection to the kids when we acknowledged each other.

We boated through the village, and after the village there was a very old forest, completely submerged by water! It was incredible. We couldn’t stop saying wow and feeling as though this was a true rare beauty in the world. We then drove out for a quick float in a massive lake (biggest in Cambodia?) and after, we stopped at a little floating restaurant that had a crazy walkway suspended by the same sketchy poles maybe 20 feet off the water. We had a quick walk down the serene walkway, (avoiding a boat ride tourist trap!) and after that we were boated back through the village and back to our tuk tuk guy. It was a whirlwind trip, but we loved it and after that, our love and appreciation for Cambodia grew.

My favourite thing to see was a young boy, maybe 4 years old, in a giant metal bowl, floating along, using what looked like his mothers pink flip flops as paddles. I imagine he was on his way to his friends house for a play date.

Quick learning session!

English – Hello!

Khmer – suers day! (sounds like Thursday with an S and said like sewer-seday)

English – thank you.

Khmer – a kun (sounds like ah gwun)

When back in the city, we enjoyed some Khmer food for lunch and resting time at the pool with a nice book.

For our last meal, we enjoyed some unreal Italian food at a nice place called Il Forno, where we had delicious wine, calamari, Caprese salad, and Napoli pizza. It was delicious, but it was hard to ignore the beggars who came by to visit our table. It was hard, they were either very young or maimed by mines (Siem reap is not far from mine country) and it was difficult. Here we were enjoying a delicious meal that is worth probably the equivalent of their monthly wage. The beggars were very happy and friendly though. When we told a young girl we didn’t want to buy her book, she said, “ok, welcome to Cambodia, enjoy your food!” And happily skipped off. This just goes to show the heart of the people here. You could really feel it.

At last, we took one last tuk tuk ride to the airport, and now we are in Kuala Lumpur. We will let you know how it is here!

A kun for reading!

Love Julie and Tristan

Xin Nian Hao!

A belated Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of you! I hope you are all holding up OK.

We have been really busy over here on the other side of the world. Unfortunately, we don't get the same holidays as everyone in North America, so we enjoyed Christmas Day and New Years Day holidays in exchange for two more working Saturdays! Woohoo!

It is the time of year for cheer and exhaustion apparently. We have been working very hard and are really looking forward to our big five-week vacation. It is exam time/end of semester which, as teachers know, is the busiest time of year. I finally have my marks in now though, so I can let you know what we’ve been doing!

For our Christmas celebrations, our good friend Danny decided to cook up Pad Thai for everyone around campus, which was a really nice change. We enjoyed Pad Thai, Christmas carols, and drinks on our Christmas Eve. Our friend Patti sang a beautiful and original Christmas song which was captured on video…too bad I don’t know how we can upload it. It was a wonderful night spent with friends on what can be the loneliest time of the year for expats. Thank you friends for making it special!

Our Christmas Day was spent talking to family and friends, opening gifts and eating a bunch of delicious chocolate and western food! Julie and I both got spoiled :). We went out to a restaurant called Splendido which is in the most random spot in Wuhan near the school. The food was great, and the sous chef is actually a guy from Canada! Who’d have thought.

After that it was back to work for a couple days, until we had another holiday – New Years! We pampered ourselves by booking into a wonderful five-star hotel in Hankou called the Marco Polo. Although my Chinese has improved a bunch, it was tough to communicate how to get there. It’s pretty funny sometimes – Marco Polo in Chinese is 马哥孛罗, which is literally ma ge bei lo. Horse, Brother, Polo, and Luo, which depending on context or situation can mean “subordinate gang of bandits” or “catch birds with a net.” Boy Chinese is odd. I do enjoy learning it though, and I’m starting to be able to have conversations with people and understand a whole lot more, including ridiculous taxi driver talks. Molly, now I am starting to understand what it was like for you, I’ve started to give people the Chinese to English play by play of what is happening, especially when its funny. (That guy just told his friend that he is a stupid $^#*!!! hahaha!!!)

Anyways, we went to Marco Polo, and after checking in and hanging out in our super luxury room, we enjoyed a delightful dinner with friends of all sorts of western food. I had a pizza that was very nice; Julie enjoyed a tasty salmon and asparagus dish.

We went out for drinks with a lot of our co-workers at a club called “The Jazz Club.” I’m not sure if that’s its real name, or just the English name that we have for it. We enjoyed some awesome music, beer that wasn’t horrible Chinese water-beer, and friends! When the clock struck midnight, some of us went down to the river.

Our hotel was across the street from the banks of the Yangtze River, and that’s where we headed at 1 am to light off a paper lantern. The whole night, from the restaurant, our hotel room, and outdoors, we watched thousands and thousands of paper lanterns fly into the night sky. So naturally, we joined in the ritual of sending our wishes for the new year out into the polluted sky.

We bought a paper lantern for ¥10, which is like $1.25 or so, and wished for happiness all year or something. We watched our lantern take off into the sky, then waded through the plastic garbage and the lanterns that crashed and burned back to our hotel.

The next day we had a huge breakfast buffet of western food, spent some time in the pool and sauna, then checked out a new International Supermarket on Han Street.

Since then, we’ve had a week of Professional Development and preparing for our next semester. Unfortunately, Tristan sprained his ankle yesterday playing a big staff game of basketball, so he will be hobbling around at the beginning of our vacation. :(.

Tomorrow, we are taking off on our first flight to BKK from Wuhan. From there its Siem Reap – Cambodia, Kuala Lumpur – Malaysia, HCMC – Vietnam, Singapore, and Ubud – Bali to round it out. We are ecstatic to have some time to relax. We definitely need it and feel like it will be well deserved.

We will most definitely do a blog post from one of the locations above. Most likely from Bali, as we are there the longest.

Happy New Year!

T&J

It’s been too long, friend.

Hi.

Don’t be mad.

We didn’t mean to leave you like we did. Hanging and all.

Sorry.

Lots of things have changed for us since our previous post. Last you had heard, we were busy getting back into the groove of things here in China, we planned a trip to Hong Kong, and hoped to run a half marathon.

We ran the half marathon yesterday. My body is absolutely exhausted. My hips have been in heavy recovery mode, and Julie’s knees are in pain after we both ran 21 km yesterday. We look like senior citizens the way that we are walking around so tenderly today. But we achieved our goal.

Shanghai Marathon registration

Perhaps I’m getting a little bit too ahead of ourselves here. Where were we? Oh right. Going to Hong Kong. I’ll get back to the more recent stuff soon enough. The trip to HK was excellent.

We had a great time enjoying some western food, English speaking people, and beautiful parks and tourist spots. Our first day we spent our time getting accustomed to where we were staying, we had breakfast at a delicious American Café, and spent the rest of the day walking around and hanging out! It was great.

The next days we spent time on our rooftop pool, in Stanley which was on the other side of HK island, shopping in the central HK area, enjoying some unreal wonton soup at Mak’s Noodle House in Kowloon right near the Jordan MTR station, meeting up with an old friend (Hey Bob Jones!), and lastly, an unforgettable experience at the top of the Peak – a HK landmark.

Stanley, Hong Kong

Why was the Peak the best part of our trip?

I’m glad you asked. First, we did some shopping for a new outfit for Julie, then once we were looking our finest, we took a cab up to the Peak for a dinner reservation at a place called the Peak Lookout Restaurant. I had the young duckling, Julie had the steak tartar. After a delightful dinner, we went for a nice walk down a dimly lit pathway away from the hordes of mainland Chinese taking billions of photos of the amazing HK skyline, and it was there that I popped the question! Julie said yes, and we had to walk all the way back to the restaurant where it was bright enough for Julie to get her first glimpse at her ring!

Where it all happened

Once we had become engaged, life took a drastic turn for the busier (if at all possible). I had no concept of all of the things that needed to (and still need to!) get done to make this thing a reality. 

Back in Wuhan, we stayed busy with work and I turned 26. It sure feels like I’m an adult now, though I don’t feel that old. Also, we did in fact purchase a scooter for ¥2400. (about $400) which has come in really handy for short trips to the store, out for dinner, to the gym and whatever! A full tank of gas costs about $4, whereas a taxi fare one way to vanke or somewhere nearby is about 1/2 of that! So it will definitely pay itself off in no time :). Don’t worry, we have super cool helmets, and we drive slowly and super cautiously due to the crazy traffic here.

At The Forbidden City

Our next adventure was a few weeks later when we went to Beijing with our friends Quinn and his wife Yanni, Anthony, Antonio, Erin and Jordan! We took the overnight sleeper train, arrived in Beijing at 7:30 am Saturday morning, dropped off our bags at our hostel, and took in the sights! It was really cool to be in the Capital of China.

It has a definitively different feel than Wuhan or Shanghai. There was a much larger police presence and security was hopped up everywhere. We went to Tian’anmen square, took our photos with the huge picture of Mao, visited his embalmed body in the Maosoleum (see what I did there? p.s. that goes out to Derek) which was a very strange experience. We stood in line and slowly shuffled our way into the Maosoleum and when we got inside, people were visibly emotional when visiting their 40-year-dead leader. I don’t exactly know how to describe it. After that, we walked through the excessively crowded Forbidden City and visited the Temple of Heaven – where we actually stood on/touched the CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE. Incredible.

The Temple of Heaven

On Sunday, we hired a driver named Zhan to take us to the JinShanLing portion of the Great Wall, which was absolutely breathtakingly stunning. He was a great companion, and he took some nice photos of us! I think that the Great Wall (or Chang Cheng 长城）was perhaps the most incredible historical site I’ve ever seen. Maybe on par with Olympia in Greece. We were lucky enough to have an amazing and clear day where we got a lot of sweet photos.  I also learned a cool Chinese proverb (said by our good friend Mao Zedong, who else?!) – 不道长城非好汉! Which is – Bu Dao Chang Cheng Fei Hao Han. One who fails to reach the Great Wall, cannot be called a man. Basically, if you start something, you’d damn well better finish it – or you aren’t a (wo)man.

Our driver posed us for this photo

The trip to the Great Wall was definitely the highlight for me, but it also helped that my friend Quinn led us to every amazing Beijing restaurant/watering hole that he knew of. Overall, I would love to go back there. The wall was breathtaking, and the city was really cool to visit as well. 我们爱北京！It has definitely spurred talk about weekend trips within China in the future.

Alone on The Great Wall

The mens room at the Great Wall

Then, most recently, we went to Shanghai to run in the half Marathon!

The marathon was really something else. We took the overnight train to Shanghai and met up with my friend Puneet. Julie shopped for wedding dresses all day, and I hung with Puneet and his awesome friend Simon, ate some delightful food at Masala Art, and just had a great time catching up.

Sunday morning, the craziness commenced. We got up at 5:15 to try to catch a cab to the Bund, where the race started. We waited for about 30 minutes before we were able to share a cab with a French expat who happened to be going to the Marathon as well. Thanks for sharing the cab with us ami! Once there, we had to navigate the crowds to drop off our bags and make our way to the start line.

It felt like a crazy mob the whole time, people running this way and that, huge crowds to push through, police everywhere and all kinds of people. 30,000 people took part in this race. More people than my hometown. Dumb.

Once we got onto ZhongShan Boulevard where the race started, we met up with our friends Danny and Michele who we had been training with. Julie and Michele were confident that they would beat their goal of 2 hours for the half marathon, and I hoped for around 1:45.

Once the race started, it was absolute chaos. We tried our best to run a pace that we were comfortable with, but there were so many people that we basically weaved in and out of space for the first few kilometres. I got fed up with the ridiculous people who were running and lost Julie, Michele and Danny about 4-5 kms into the race. Ridiculous people. OMG. What the hell were these people doing here? I couldn’t help but stare as I ran past some of these racers.

There was also a 10km or a “Mini-Marathon” option, but I ran past some of the strangest things you could imagine:

A mother dressed in jeans and a winter jacket who was basically pulling a 3-4 year old daughter with her.

A Mickey Mouse man.

A Sumo Wrestler in a blown up Sumo Suit.

A topless man with nothing but a loincloth on (It was about 4 or 5 C – I was cold)

FAKE Marathon runners, who had photocopied a friends number and taped it onto their shirts. Yeah right you are all number 25644.

And just tons of people wearing jeans, inappropriate shoes, winter jackets, and backpacks! As a P.E. Teacher, this vexed me to no end.

I realize that this post is super long, so I will try to end it abruptly. We are re-cooperating from the race, and hoping for official race times soon.

We have also booked planes and transportation for our 5 week holiday in January/February where we will be going to Cambodia, Vietnam and Indonesia! It is getting to be Christmas season, and we are missing home. Friends and family – we love and miss you! Merry Christmas!!

We will try to post more often.

Don’t say that. We will. I promise.

晚安 (Goodnight)

Tristan and Julie

Round 2

Well, hello again. After an amazing summer traveling around Western Canada visiting our friends and close family, we are once again back in China.

Things are quite different this year. I am teaching at the high school and Julie is also at the high school working full time. Unlike when we first arrived in China last year, the beginning of the school year is ridiculously busy.  I promised more blog entries this year, and so far we aren’t having a very good start.

Our flight was fairly uneventful and long. We met up with lots of old friends we knew from last year at the Vancouver airport and were able to travel with them all the way back to Wuhan.

It was really strange to be back in Wuhan, almost like we were coming home a little bit. We were a little jet lagged our first days, but tried our best to get back into the swing of things as soon as we could. We did a bunch of shopping for our little place on campus and worked hard to make it into a home. My little Bonsai tree suffered from the sun, almost to the point of death! I have tried hard to water it often and give it whatever it needed and now little sprigs of leaves are springing back out of the small branches.

I wrote the stuff above about a week ago. We are so busy!  AHHHHH

We bought gym passes this year in an effort to get healthier, and it so far has been great. We run to the gym all the time (pollution hasn’t been too bad yet) and are feeling great! So that has been new and nice.

On the other hand, we just worked a six-day work week, and are absolutely exhausted. Living at the school has been a bit more difficult having to go out often to get groceries, go to the gym, and out to eat, so we’ve been toying with the idea of purchasing a scooter.

No we are not crazy. Scooters don’t go that fast, and I figure that I drove one through Thailand (the psycho traffic of Koh Samui actually), and I rode my bike every day last year without a problem, so why not?

Anyway, we have yet to go and get one, but it would sure make life easier. Today we went to Guanggu, and it actually took us TWO FULL HOURS to get home. There were no cabs to be found, the only bus that goes that way is the 901 and it is sardined every time. Black cab scooters propositioned us, and a man named Azzam from Pakistan who was in Wuhan for business came to talk to us for some reason. It was a crazy adventure home.

In two weeks time, we will be going to Hong Kong for some much-deserved R&R, and we have started booking flights for our big five week vacation in February. So far we have a flight to Bangkok and from Bangkok to Siem Reap in Cambodia! So we are excited for that. More plans and flights will be booked later. If you’ve got recommendations, comment below!

We have been (and by we, I mean Julie) cooking at home a whole lot more; which has been excellent! We’ve had rice and peas and jerk pork, scones, homemade granola, delightful soups, tasty potato casserole, spring onion pie, and it’s only 2 weeks into the year! I am lucky to have such a wonderful woman to take such good care of me J.

Julie is planning on signing up for the Shanghai half-marathon in December. Hopefully registration goes well, we will keep you updated!

We have been having a good time reconnecting with old friends, meeting new ones, and enjoying being back in Wuhan.

Much love to everyone back home,

Tristan and Julie

Countdown

Hi Everyone,

I know that it has been far too long since we have updated you on our crazy lives here on the other side of the world, so I figured I would write some things before I have to tell each and every one of you a crazy long story every time I see you! So, at this point, we have 10 days left until we are back on home soil (and we are counting every second). A lot has happened since we shared our Shanghai experiences with you:

• I was on Chinese television with my friends Derek, Molly, and Shane.
• Julie was interviewed by a newspaper.
• I hosted a “Parent Meeting” day, where (no regrets of course) I sang in front of hundreds of my student’s parents.
• We did more exploring of the city.
• We cracked into the world of TaoBao.
• I appeared on a billboard at my school, and my photo was utilized as a magazine cover for a student recruiting magazine for my school.
• We are thinking about Canada nonstop. This may be the most homesick we’ve ever been.
• We decided to live at the school next year.

Obviously the most exciting thing was that I appeared on Channel 6 Wuhan News (for 1 full second!) and later, the station aired the entire show that I was a part of. Now a few weeks before this big show, I was asked kind of offhandedly if I’d like to join the Foreign National School and sing Chinese Opera on TV. Naturally, I signed up instantly. I may have never had the chance to look like a fool on television again, so OF COURSE I did it.

Now, although I had committed with my word, that did not mean that I began practicing right away. It was only until the week of the television performance that I started asking around.

Me – “When do we need to start practicing for this thing?”

Other staff – “I don’t know. We’ve been practicing for months. Here is the song, you sing this part. Good luck.”

Crap.

I am lucky enough to have a schedule where, on Fridays, I have a ridiculous amount of teacher preparation time. It was during that day that I began to memorize my part for the Opera. Which would be performed in 24 hours. Smart one, Tristan. So I sat at my desk for a few hours and tried to sing/memorize this crazily tonal language as a song.

Somehow I was able to do it, and the song was pretty catchy too. Here is my part typed out from memory:

Yi fu fu xian ming de, yuan yang wa

Yi qun qun sheng dong de hua pu sa

Yi di di guo miao Yi dian dian kua da

Yi zhang zhang lian pu mei jia jiaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAaaaaaaaa

WAAAAhaaa ha ha ha ha ha Wa ha ha ha ha HA HAAAAAAA

I have no idea what the tones were, but my part (translated) was pretty much about how beautiful and silly the Beijing Opera singers were. The whole song was very funny, it is a classic Beijing Opera song, but it is all about how foreigners don’t understand the Beijing Opera and what it is all about. Frankly, we found it hilarious that we, foreigners, were singing a song in our terrible Chinese about how stupid and ignorant foreigners were about the Beijing Opera.

The TV experience was quite different as well. We went to the Wuhan Citizens Home (not an old folks home. I know, I thought the same too) where there was a large stage set up. After we did a horrible run-through, we waited and rehearsed for hours and hours with our costumes and make-up on. Finally, when our time came, our time in the spotlight was excellent! The students performed great, and we didn’t make too big of fools of ourselves. :). While we were there, Julie was interviewed by a magazine called Chiang Jiang weekly (Chiang Jiang is the Chinese word for the Yangtze river), and she answered a bunch of questions about our time here in Wuhan so far.

I am supposed to get a DVD of the whole experience, so if you really want to see it, let me know. Maybe I can upload it somehow.

The next big thing that happened was that I ended up being the host for both a “Parent’s Meeting” and for the Grade 9 graduation ceremony.

In typical Chinese fashion, I was alerted that I would host these events last minute – in both cases, it was literally the day before the event, so I just went out there with my Chinglish paper and aided in the mass murder of our language in China. Such phrases as “Now, here are the leaders and teachers that are attending our event – thank you for your attending.” were common in these events. Lines like these would not go over so well in Canada – you might get some funny looks – but here, they are just happy to have some English accompanying their important events. Also, during the “Parent’s Meeting” I was asked by some grade 8 girls if I could accompany them in a rendition of Taylor Swift’s newest song called “22.” I did it, but I won’t say more about that, except that it would never happen in Canada (actually, it would be a big no-no) but I might only be in China once.

Next on the docket – TAOBAO.

For those of you who like a little bit of online shopping, Taobao is a gold, diamond, gas, and coal mine filled with EVERYTHING that you could imagine buying. Need a car? No problem, shipped to your door next day. Some weird obscure thing? No big deal. Choose from a bunch of different sellers. Need any foreign foods at all? Click, done. The only issue is that it’s 100% in Chinese, so we needed some help navigating at first. Google chrome has a translation app included, so we’ve been using that a bunch too.

We found all kinds of great stuff, tea sets for $8 CAD, replica propaganda posters (awesome) and a bunch of other things. We bought tons of things on the cheap. This is the greatest website that we have discovered here. It might be because the Chinese “river crab” has been censoring us, but Taobao more than makes up for it.

Also, I’ve become something of a symbol for the Chinese middle school here. Due to my increasingly active role (hosting events and such) and my soaring popularity (I’m really not that awesome, I’m just the only white foreign teacher in the whole school) a picture I posed for has appeared on a billboard near our school, and magazines for the high school graduation/student recruitment. Here is the photo:

Finally, our latest news.

We have decided to move onto campus next year. Julie has accepted a position as an ESL teacher at the high school, and because of that, we get subsidized rent at the school. So we have to say goodbye to our beautiful place in Vanke. But, the place on campus that we are going to move into is pretty darned nice as well. We are excited for sleep-ins and not having to commute as much. On the downside, things are a little further away.

We cannot wait until we board the plane in just a few days. We are daydreaming multiple times daily of our friends and family, the clean mountain/prairie air, some diversity in food, HOME COOKED MEALS, normal traffic, a break from the millions of people, and almost above anything else, camping. Oh dear goodness, get us some wilderness.

That’s not to say that it is terrible here. Costs of living are SUPER low. I can buy a 500 ml bottle of beer (it’s crap light beer, but…) for 50 cents, and you could easily live for like 2 days on 100 ¥ – which is equal to about $18. We will miss costs of things (how can we ever eat out again!?) and the food too. Holy cow, the Chinese food in Canada is just plain sad in comparison…

That’s all that I’ve got for the time being. I’m just about finished teaching all of my classes, I’ve only got 3 more days of it until I’m freeeeeee. Julie is lucky enough to already be finished. She is just supervising exams for the rest of this week.

Hopefully we will see all of you in the summertime, but if not, I’ll try to keep you updated. There might be a bit of a shift from crazy China to organized Canada.

Today is also hockey after school day, so keep your stick on the ice.

Tristan

 

A week in Shanghai

!!!!!!!!!Warning: the following post is hella long! Set aside a bit of time to read and pace yourself accordingly!!!!!!!!!!

Hello everyone, and happy labour day (Labour week here in China). For our week long holiday, we decided to take a fast train to Shanghai for a 5 days trip! Our first adventure began before we even left Wuhan, we had to buy train tickets. We went down to the closest travel agent that we could find, but after some broken Chinese from us, and a call to our Chinese friend, we found out that they only sold plane tickets. So we took the bus down the street to the next closest one, and with more translating help from our Chinese friend Carrie, we were able to buy return tickets for both Julie and I to Shanghai for ¥1,000 (about $160). Awesome!

It was Julie’s first bullet train ride and my 2nd, so it was great to get a good look at rural China. Now, in Canada, rural life is great. Most of the time you still have access to things like Internet, shopping, and whatever basics you might need. There are even great opportunities to go and play in the wilderness – hikes, 4×4, camping or fishing. In China, there is none of this. As far as the eye can see, every centimetre of usable land is taken up for farming of rice, vegetables and plants. Furthermore, forget GPS tractors and organized farms, these plots of land are the weirdest and seemingly random shapes, tended to by an 1900’s style of farming. I saw ONE tractor on our entire trip from Wuhan to Shanghai. That is around 1200 kms. We saw tons of people doing the farm work by hand and using oxen to plow and pull stuff. None of the roads are paved, and the houses that people live in look old and in harsh disrepair.

When we arrived in Shanghai, the disparity between the rich city and the rural farmlands was mind blowing. Hongqiao railway station has 30 tracks for trains to come into, and the subway map for Shanghai looks like a snakes nest.

Wuhan seemed dumpy and totally inferior in comparison to Shanghai. It was crazy to think that they are even located in the same country. Here are some major differences that we noticed between Wuhan and Shanghai:

– People actually have some manners. The way that people get onto the subway, board buses, walk down the street and eat food is so different. In Wuhan, it is a mad dash of jostling and shoving with no resemblance of a line up to get on or off the bus/subway. People pay no heed to you on the street and are very messy and dirty. They spit anywhere, throw their garbage everywhere and just seem to have a general disregard for the environment. We compare the attitude there to Cro-magnons.
In Shanghai, people line up(maybe not as well as in Canada, but there actually is a line!), have some patience, apologize for bumping into you, and try their best to spit discreetly and respectively (if that’s even possible). The streets are much cleaner, and the people seem to care more for their city.

– Traffic. Driving in Wuhan is like driving in Grand Theft Auto. Anything goes. You will literally see cars driving on the sidewalks, wrong side of the road, everywhere! Traffic policing is virtually non-existent. The only thing that seems to have some pull are the lights. Cars stop for red lights. Scooters don’t. The rule for traffic in Wuhan is that the biggest vehicle always has the right of way, and if you don’t respect that, you are going to get smashed by a huge truck or car or something. Also, Wuhan drivers love the sound of their horn so much, the street is a constant traffic musical.
In Shanghai, traffic is normal. Some scooters still drive on the sidewalk, but think of traffic in Vancouver. It’s really similar. Also, BIKE LANES!

– Shanghai was pretty much a western city. Like my friend Puneet said, you could live in Shanghai and have the same quality of life/access to western stuff as you would in Canada. In Wuhan, you know you are in some crazy place in China.

– Fashion. Most people in Wuhan dress very similarly, in a pretty obvious Chinese style. In Shanghai, people seemed a lot more individualistic and were way more well dressed than in Wuhan. They look much more western.

– Language. Pretty much everyone we ran into in Shanghai could speak at least a little bit of English and understand what we wanted. In Wuhan, if you can’t speak some basic Chinese, you are hooped.

We arrived in Shanghai on a Saturday afternoon, and had really no problems finding our hotel and navigating the super sweet subway system. We spent the first night in our little area near Dong’an road subway station and had some great Chinese food at a nearby restaurant.
This was basically the only Chinese experience we had the entire time in Shanghai.

On day two, we did a lot of sightseeing and adventuring. We went to the gorgeous French Concession area of Shanghai (Oh goodness, can we live there??) and went to Fuxing park, where lots of people gather to dance, fly kites, sing/play instruments, and just enjoy the sunshine. So that was really beautiful! Afterwards, we had a beer and lunch at the Boxing Cat Brewery. This whole area around Fuxing really reminded us of Kitsilano with its trendy shops and tree lined avenues.
Next, we went to Shanghai’s famous Bund, where we lucked out with a very clear day for great photos! It was really amazing to be there in person. We visited the Chinese war memorial, and the old lighthouse that was featured on the Amazing Race! So cool, right?!
After that, we walked down Nanjing road. Nanjing road is a large pedestrian street with all kinds of shopping and huge malls and restaurants lining it. We walked for a really long time until we were hungry for dinner. The whole walk was cool, the expensive shops (Gucci, Prada, etc.) never really ended, and big buildings and fountains were everywhere. Then began our love/hate relationship with the restaurant that everyone recommended that we visit called Element Fresh (who serve delicious American style food). On our little tourist map, Element Fresh was conveniently close to where we walked to, so we decided to go there for dinner. We walked and walked, but it wasn’t where the map said it would be. So I went into a little bakery and asked the people there. They had no idea, but a nice man tried to help me find it. He spoke only a tiny bit of English, so we spoke mostly Chinese as we walked around and looked for Element Fresh. It was a cool experience for me, because I was able to have a conversation in Chinese with this nice man! He was only working in Shanghai, and had just finished working when we met him, and he thought he could help us. We weren’t able to discuss much because of our language troubles, but we eventually found Element Fresh, which unfortunately was a delivery only store. Why the heck would they label it on the tourist map then!?
So we thanked the nice man for helping us, and decided to have dinner at a gorgeous little Italian restaurant, called La Strada, where we had an unreal Caprese salad and a yummy brick oven pizza! After that, we went back down to the Bund where we captured some great night shots of the Oriental Pearl tower and the other cool buildings in Pudong.

The next day, we decided to go across the river into Pudong and check out the other side of the Huangpu river. The walkway was really nice, but the day was much more polluted and hazy, so we didn’t get many good pictures of the beautiful old buildings on the other side of the river. We went and checked out the super brand mall, which was filled with more luxury stores. We walked to another Element Fresh location inside the super brand mall, where we had the first salad we’ve eaten for a long time!
The meal was great, but we had a weird experience with a mom and her baby. At this point, we are pretty used to babies with split pants peeing and pooping all over the streets and what have you, but at Element Fresh, a lady came and sat right beside Julie, took off her baby’s diaper, and with the diaper on the baby but open, she made “shush” sounds (maybe emulating water coming out of a tap?) to help the baby pee! It was really weird and I was pretty disgusted by the whole thing, but hey, that’s China.
Next, we went to the black market and did our best at bartering and shopping for all things fake. We had to barter long and hard for some items and ended up getting a bunch of great deals. I got a fake Canucks jersey :).
Of course, with such incredible choice of food in Shanghai, we went to Paulaner for dinner, where I enjoyed a litre of beer (Julie 1/2 litre) and the classic German meal! The restaurant was great, it was located in the French Concession area in a beautiful heritage building, and a live band played all the hits! Pretty cute to see the Chinese servers in traditional German costumes too.

The next day we went to the Yuyuan gardens, where there were so many people walking around a very beautiful area filled with old classic Shanghaiese buildings. The gardens were really nice, but busy. I really liked the old buildings and the garden, but we didn’t stay long because of the sheer amount of people. There were thousands for sure.

After that, our friend Puneet came into the city to visit. Julie did some shopping and Puneet and I went to a 007 museum where we got to see all the great stuff that was actually used in the movies. It was pretty cool!
We had a great meal at a place close to our hotel called the Blue Frog, then we had some drinks over at the Shanghai Brewery. The beer was sub par, but it was crazy to see the amount of foreigners there! We definitely did some staring, as we aren’t used to seeing so many foreigners around. It was a good night.

The next day we had tons of problems. First, we couldn’t find that damned Element Fresh again. We went to the third different location, and it was still super hard to find. We looked all over this huge shopping area, got lost in the subway, and walked for a long time before we finally found it at noon, for breakfast! After that, Puneet forgot his credit card at the restaurant, so we luckily got it back before we took off to the black market. On our way to the black market, Julie’s long beautiful dress that she got in Thailand got caught in an escalator! Puneet and I had to run for help before her whole dress was sucked into the escalator! Luckily, the staff at the metro were very helpful and quick to respond, and we had Julie out of her predicament in no time. She just had to do some impromptu hemming of the bottom of her dress. To drown our sorrows, we had quite the shopping spree at the black market, and we all left with big black bags filled with the goods!
We had dinner at a delicious Thai restaurant called the Lemongrass Lounge, and went to a store called Uniqlo where I found a bunch of good clothes that actually fit me! Next we went to the City Shop where you can get some great imported things like Doritos, cheese, beer, wine, cereal, chocolate, and anything an expat truly desired. We drooled at a bunch of these things, but only bought some stuff, because the prices were ridiculous! A bag of Doritos was 62¥, which is just over $10!!! We also saw 100% pure maple syrup for 200¥! That is like $30! So you can get some of your favourite foods in Shanghai, but be ready to leave without some of your limbs. Puneet had to take off, so we had an early night, only to discover that Julie left her phone at the black market! Oh my god!!!! It just seemed to never end.

Our last day consisted of a nice breakfast at Guci coffee, where we had pancakes (yum) and a brisk trip back to the black market, where the Chinese shopkeeper was kind enough to meet us, so that Julie could get her phone back. Then we discovered that the screen was broken! Now there is only a big black line with a white background. Can’t see a thing :(.

All in all, we had a great trip to Shanghai, and will definitely be returning. And for any of you thinking of visiting Shanghai, GO!!!!