Our winter break has officially begun… We arrived (3 pm Sunday, here) after a pretty uneventful flight. Korean Airlines was great! So, after checking into Toyoko Inn in the fading daylight, we tried to run around a bit to see at least a few things. On the agenda: 1: The Monzen-nakacho Kaiten sushi restaurant. Reaffirmed […]
Itinerary: Tokyo, Japan Seoul, South Korea Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia Jakarta & Yogyakarta, Indonesia
We’ve got our visas. We’ve got the gifts for our guides. We’ve got over 17,000 RMB (~$2,600) and a couple hundred USD. We’re checked out of our hotel in Beijing….. Strolling outside towards the subway with our luggage and goodies, wouldn’t you know, it’s an absolutely gorgeous day in Beijing. The sky a clear azure, […]
China is the perfect place to end this incredible trip around the world. China makes you homesick. Ok…. Actually, China just makes us want to be anywhere but China. We even miss North Korea when we’re in China. You can’t love every place you visit. Who would want to? Maybe sometimes the culture shock is […]
Sometimes the most entertaining thing at a tourist site is not the site itself… but the tourists. This is certainly true in China. Just find a comfortable vantage point to observe the subjects in their natural habitat, behaving naturally, and you will likely be entertained by an array of both highly predictable and completely unpredictable […]
Just got back to Beijing after 8 days/7 nights in North Korea. It’s a pretty weird feeling to have freedom of movement and to feel comfortable speaking freely again here in the “kinder, gentler” Chinese communism. Let’s call it “Communism Lite.” Really though, all the jokes about the Chinese being such great capitalists…. the same […]
Tomorrow is the day. Our flight is booked and our visas are in hand for our trip to North Korea. We’ll be there for seven days total, and during that time, we’re going to be really “off the grid.” In a place where the only people with internet access are high government officials, and the only […]
Starting to finish up some of the main sites in Beijing, and today we visited one of the bigger ones: The Forbidden City. It’s big, huge even, popular amongst foreigners and locals alike, and really, really crowded. We’ve started to fine tune some of our “crowd thinning” tactics for pictures though, and we managed to […]
After several days in China, we have learned the secret to finding satisfaction with our visit. Always set the bar low, and expect waaaayy less than you are told you will get, and then when “it” happens, either it meets your expectation or you will be pleasantly surprised. By “it” I mean everything you can […]
Crowds are virtually inescapable in Asia. Looking at professional pictures of isolated jungle temples or beautiful monuments without a soul in sight can awaken the inner explorer, dreaming of wandering alone through the sites in the pictures. When one actually makes it to the site, it’s usually a disappointment to find that other “explorers” have […]
As it turns out, Chinese people love “Chinatowns” so much that they actually have them in their own country. I mean sure, we’ve seen Chinatown’s in American and Canadian cities, even in Mexico. On this trip, we’ve seen them everywhere but Russia. We didn’t really spend any time at any of them because we figured […]
The rain finally caught up to us. We’ve travelled through India and Southeast Asia during rainy season with maybe one hour (cumulative) of rain in our way. It was great. But today, it finally caught up with us and we had a full day of rain. Miserable, heavy, angry sheets of rain. I suppose it […]
Step into your local Wal-Mart or Dollar Tree and you will find many imported “goods” from China. In fact, I can almost guarantee that you have at least several items around you at this very moment with a label that says “Made in China.” And how is that? I mean, yeah, we all know the […]
Today we headed out bright and early for a day trip to Huangluo Yao village. The village is pretty much part of the Guilin sightseeing trifecta, along with a cruise on the Li River and several of the city tour sights. The main attraction at this village is the rice terraces built all along the […]
A couple of years ago, while living in Miami for a time, we had the pleasure of making a pretty regular habit of Cuban cuisine. One of the Cuban offerings that really became a habit during that time was the coffee. Specifically, a beverage called a Cortadito. In the spectrum of Cuban coffee drinks, a cortadito […]