Sanya

Coworker Dave and I decided to take a quick visit to the island paradise of Sanya this weekend. Sanya is located in Hainan Province, which is an island on the southernmost tip of China. It was described to us as "The Hawaii of China." I've never been to Hawaii, but if it's cloudy and rainy and very green, then I guess it's the same. It was pretty cloudy and overcast Friday, Saturday, and Sunday morning. Sunday afternoon was absolutely beautiful, though. Extremely sunny and bright. And I guess I don't learn well. After the visit to Miami, you think I'd understand what sunscreen was for. I was only in the sun for 30-45 minutes, and I burned like a mofo. Not as bad as Dave, however.

We originally decided to go down because flights are 900RMB, or about $120 round trip. There aren't a lot of sights near Sanya, but one cool thing we heard about was Hao Dao, or Monkey Island. Imagine an island with over 1000 monkeys, without bears nearby.
They had some of the monkeys doing tricks:
Then there was monkey jail, outside of which one of the monkeys became enamoured with Dave.
Near Monkey Island is a small town called Xincun. It's a harbor town, as you'll see. We took some time to just stroll thru the town and the market area. One of the most intersting things to do in any town is just walk the streets. You end up seeing things that are hard to comprehend from our standpoint. It's also a lot of fun trying to interact with the locals (sometimes, that is).
Saturday was spent just walking thru Sanya itself. I don't have a lot of pictures, mostly because we were just enjoying it. We of course ran across street vendors of all sorts.
There must be lots of Russian visitors to Sanya, because there were lots of signs like this. Many were Russian first, then Chinese, then English.
Sunday was just relaxing. So I'll leave you with pictures of 7.5 km worth of white sand beach. Yes, I brought some home!
Hopefully the upcoming weekend has a trip to Hong Kong, if just for a day. So maybe I'll get some more pics for you all.

Say Hello to my Little Friend!

It seems this is the year to get out. And by get out, I don't mean outdoors. The list of people I know making foreign excursions this year is relatively large.

• Derek and Nicole - making a stop in Australia before moving to Germany for an undetermined amount of time.
• Chad and Liz - Heading out to Bangkok for 7 weeks.
• Donnie and Heather - A visit to Brazil.
• Erin and Sara(maybe) - making a visit to China.
• Kelsey - hopefully coming to China, if she ever gets a passport.
• My parents - also claim they're going to come to China.
  

And now, another. Ms. Hye Kim is heading to Geneva, Switzerland for an internship. Unlike the others (that's you, Derek), she has felt a need to catalog her trip via the Interweb's most useless feature, A BLOG! It probably would have made more sense for me to go to Geneva with tall white people, and her to come where all the short Asians are. On the other hand, I don't speak German or French, and I don't think she speaks Chinese. Oh well. I wish her the best of luck!

Movin' On Up

Not quite like The Jeffersons, but a skyward move nonetheless. Since arriving in China, I've been living in at the China Hotel. A nice enough hotel, but there was no mistaking the fact that I was living in a hotel room. I was the proverbial man in a suitcase. Well tonight the hotel manager informs me that my new room is ready, and a suite awaits!

A suite at the China Hotel is like staying at the Holiday Inn with your extended family, and you've got adjoining rooms. They obviously just took the bathroom out of one of the rooms and made it a small kitchenette. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the extra space, but a couple months of this is gonna be rough.

Sorry I don't have any pictures today. I've been pretty busy with work, which is a nice thing for now. Maybe I'll get out this weekend.

Skype

For those of you that have Skype, I'm available on that if you would like to talk to me. I should be easy to find via search.

If you don't know, Skype allows for computer to computer voice calls, completely free of charge. There is also a feature to make calls to regular lines, at a very low rate. I tested it a couple of times, and it works very well here in China.

Yul Brynner

I once received a piece of sage advice, that one night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble. Being the brave soul that I am, I tried for two nights. I wish Chad the best of luck going for 8 weeks. Oh, if you wanted to know why Yul Brynner mattered in that song, he was King Mongut of Siam in The King and I. That's something I would never have known.

My time in Thailand did not start off on the right foot. We had an excellent meal on Thursday night, or so I thought. By Friday morning, it was obvious I ate something very wrong, as the meal made a reappearance. I blame the fish.

Like Murray Head said, Bangkok has both muddy old rivers (that smell absolutely horrible) and a reclining Buddha. Actually, one of the world's largest reclining Buddhas.
But more on that later. After Thursday's debacle, we had hoped to go sightseeing on Friday. Unfortunately, the weather did not want to cooperate, so we went to a shopping district. The MBK mall is simply enormous. Each floor is dedicated to a certain type of item. 4th floor is games and DVD copies. 6th floor was touristy trinkets. It was okay. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at Paul's Fashions, where Dave and I decided to get fitted for some custom clothes. I bought a shirt and slacks. Pretty impressive considering they were ready the next day.

Saturday finally brought a day we could see the sights, which is Bangkok is temples, temples, and more temples. We started the morning off at Wat Arun, which was an 85 meter tall prang, or "tall thing".
After Wat Arun, we headed over to Wat Po, also known as Wat Phra Chetuphon. This is where the reclining Buddha is located. It's pretty much the major draw to this temple, although there are a couple of other sights too.
Leaving Wat Po, we headed to the largest temple/palace in Bangkok, The Grand Palace. Up until King Rama IX, this was where the king lived. It's also the location of the Emerald Buddha, which is actually jade. This was a pretty impressive sight. Also, they have a very strict dress code at this palace, with no shorts, tank tops, or inappropriate clothing.

Now that my jaunt to Southeast Asia is over, I'll probably be spending the next two weeks or so here in Guangzhou. Because of that, I'll have less cool things to show. I may make a trip down to Hong Kong though, so check back.

Kuala Lumpur

I was in Kuala Lumpur from Tuesday night to Thursday morning. If you're not familiar, Kuala Lumpur is home to the Petronas Towers, Petronas being the local oil/gas multinational. Despite the fact that the towers are the two of the world's largest buildings, they just don't look that big. Maybe it's the fact that there is nothing around them. The Sears Tower looks impressive, but it has all of Chicago's skyline along with it. Perhaps Wikipedia shows it best.

The flight to KL was a complete joke. I've never seen a smaller seat on an airplane. I actually laughed. The person in front of me was actually a bit miffed that he physically couldn't lean his seat back. He looked at me and gave me a quizzical look, like "what's wrong here?" Yeah, those are my KNEES, buddy. It was all forgiven when we landed, however. KL is clean. And it doesn't stink. They had a western radio station playing. Okay, it was Heart, but you take what you can get.

We stayed in the Ritz Carlton bacause the JW Marriott was full. That was a stroke of luck. These rooms are NICE! Butler service, full marble bathroom, all the amenities. Rockwell doesn't provide may instances to live like this, but DAMN. No iron in the room though, what's up with that. Unfortunatley, Rockwell didn't send me here for vacation. I actually do have to work. So I don't really get to see out of the city so much. But after work on Wednesday, we went out to eat in the City Center area, at the base of the towers. I did get this awesome picture.
The dinner itself was about what I expected, which was something totally unexpected. A variety of local Malay foods, with fish head soup being the "premier" dish. The highlight? I asked what kind of fish it was. A red snapper. Very tasty indeed.

I am a walking freak of nature

Or at least, that's what everyone here must think. But more on that later. I actually ventured out for some sightseeing today. Someone asked for a picture of the China Hotel, so here it is.
Right across from my hotel is a large park, Yue Xiu Park. Seeing as it's so close, I decided that it would be a good day to sightsee. The park has a large statue of five rams, which are the mythical beginings of Guangzhou. Finding said statue, however, is an exercise left up to the reader. It took me nearly two hours of tromping thru this rather large park, with lots of hills, to find it.
It was okay. It's a statue of goats. What more can you ask for? Also in Yue Xiu Park is a memorial to Dr Sun Yat Sen. This takes the form of a tower which you can climb. It's on top of a hill, so it has a good view of Guangzhou.
The most intersting part of the day was just watching everyone. China is on national holiday this week, so the park was pretty busy. Seeing entire families running around and playing was a lot of fun. It was intersting to see a bunch of people playing a game similar to hacky sack, but the kicker thing has feathers. Old and young alike would play this.

The other fascinating thing was obviously me. I had small children staring at me, mouths agape. They would then run up to me and just look up. Nearly everyone in the park did a double take when I would walk by. I'm not sure if it was my height, whiteness, or both that did it. I didn't see any other caucasians in the park. Everyone was very friendly, however. It was fun interacting with the children, most of whom could say "Hi! How are you!" or something to that effect. I was probably the highlight of their day.

Chinglish, the beginning

Surprisingly, there's not a whole lot of Chinglish here so far. Usually the English on signs is pretty good (if sparse), and nothing yet has been side aching funny. This was the first piece I thought was humourous. I don't know why, but "don't clamour" and "don't lies" was funny to me. Obviously as I get more into the culture, I'll probably find funnier sayings.

There are things here that someone older than me would probably find familiar.
What's that? A normal can of 7up? Well, look closely. The top is a pop off! When was the last time you saw one of those? 1985? One of the benefits of my job, is we see facilities like this. So my coworkers say that bottling and canning companies here just buy used machines from the US and Europe, where they can't sell cans like this. The other flashback was a recently purchased airplane ticket. The secretary at work asked if I'd be in my room at 5pm. Why? To receive the paper ticket. A what? I've never seen a paper ticket! No e-tickets here. I don't think you can even get a paper ticket in the states anymore. And it even has carbon paper in it!

Who wants a Rolex?

So tonight I had a good immersion into Chinese (or at least Guangzhou) culture. I enjoyed my second authentic Cantonese meal. You should all know that Guangzhou is known within China as having the most eclectic tastes. They will literally eat anything. Their food is also quite spicy. So tonight we went to a Hot Pot restaraunt. Think of fondue, but instead of a dip, boiling hot water is in the middle of the table. We had two locals with us, so one of them (Oscar) ordered the food. I had eaten with Oscar for lunch on Friday, and he was impressed with my appetite for spicy food. Here though, things were a little different. Oscar ordered the food without telling us exactly what he got. The food was actually very good. You place the food into the boiling water for 3-5 minutes, then pull it out and eat it. Except Oscar gave us a complete intro into local food. We ate every part of a lamb from the neck down.

• lamb meat? check.
• lamb kidney? check.
• lamb stomach? check.
• lamb testicles? check.
• lamb penis? check.

The worst part was easily the stomach/intestines. They looked disgusting and were very rubbery. Along with the lamb was vegetables and beef as well. If that's the worst I eat, this won't be too bad.

After the dinner we went to Beijing Road (Beijing Liu) where there is a huge open market. This is the place to buy knock-offs. I got a Rolex for 120RMB. Which is about $15. So who wants one? Send me an email with a picture, and I'll do my best. Also, there's Loius Vitton, Patek Phileppe, Tag Heuer, and almost anything you could think of. Guangzhou isn't known for touristy things, but is well known for shopping.
Tomorrow I hope to get back to the market for a bit, and maybe check out one of the tourist type things to do. Sorry I didn't have any pictures tonight, but I forgot my camera in the room. Tuesday night I'm going to Kuala Lumpur for the day, and Wednesday night thru Saturday I'll be in Bangkok.

I'm somewhere. But where?

Well, I'm here. Or there. Or however you want to describe it. And I'm completely overwhelmed. It wasn't just the flight. Or the taxi ride to the hotel. Or the room itself. I just don't know, it's EVERYTHING.

The flight. It's long. Damn long. How long? Well, just as you're thinking it can't last much longer, you find out it's still 5 hours to Tokyo, and at least 5 hours past that to Guangzhou. Let's do the math. I left my house at 12:30 pm on Tuesday. I've been in the hotel for about 30 minutes. It's 12:30 am Thursday now. Which is actually 11:30 am on Wednesday in Minnesota. So my actual door to door travel time was 23 hours! Add in 13 time zones, and it's like 36 hours! Flying Business class is the only way to go, at least on the 747-400. The seats lie nearly flat (176 degrees, says NWA). They fed me until I didn't want to eat, and the food was actually decent.

Security checks in Tokyo suck, however. They tore apart everything, and I had to turn every piece of electronic gismo on. That's two computers, a cell phone, Yahtzee game, digital camera, and even the calculator I had. They were very curtious (or courteous.) about it, though.

Guangzhou instantly reminded me of Florida. But without as much air conditioning and LOTS more neon. The airport was very clean. Driving, even at the hour I arrived, seemed like a nightmare. No one stays in the lane. Lots of flashing brights and honking. The hotel is okay, but I'm in an older room tonight, so we'll see what happens in the future.

Well, no going back now. Not until June, at least.