The Journey and Arrival [July 26, 2007]

Arrival in Shanghai, China
On the night of July 26, 2007, we arrived at Pudong International Airport (PVG) in Shanghai, China. Amazingly enough, with all the flights and segments of our world-hop, we made it on schedule, having had almost no delays, problems, or issues on the whole trip. Here is a map that shows the route that we took to get to China: Chicago - Dublin - London - Netherlands - Greece - Germany - Dubai - Thailand - Vietnam - and finally - Shanghai.




After five weeks of travel, we were so happy to finally arrive in our new 'home' to start the settling process. Given that we were coming from Southeast Asia, jetlag wasn't an issue. We were welcomed with a driver from Matt's company at the airport (no negotiating necessary!), who took us to the Grand Hyatt Shanghai, where we stayed for the first week or so while we secured an apartment. The Hyatt was a welcome oasis of ease and luxury, after over a month of varied cleanliness, hosptiality, and comfort. The hotel lobby is located on the 54th floor of the Jin Mao Building, what was until recently the tallest building in Shanghai (see the picture). Our room was on the 67th floor. It is located right downtown, a few minutes from Matt's office. It was a great start to our time here.

Getting Settled

We have moved into an apartment, received part of our personal belongings (we had two shipments), and are actively engaged in everyday life here. Karen works as a Grade 1 teacher at the Yew Chung International School. The school campus is located essentially within our apartment complex; she has a 5 minute walking commute to and from work. School started on August 22nd and she is off and running in with her Chinese co-teacher, Sally. Matt started work on August 1st, shortly after our arrival. His Chinese colleagues have been welcoming and eager to learn how things work in other parts of ProLogis (in North America). The apartment community provides daily shuttle service that more or less takes Matt from our front door to within two blocks of his office, which is located in the Lu Jia Zui financial district in downtown Shanghai. His commute takes 30 to 45 minutes.

Soon, we'll both have Mandarin (Chinese) teachers, the rest of our stuff, and a million stories that we think are funny about our experiences here. So far, we are having a great time and are looking forward to what this year holds for us. We plan to try to keep this blog running with periodic updates to communicate with everyone. We have cell phones here and are trying to get the internet/computer systems figured out so that we will also have a Chicago number direct to our apartment - more on contact information to follow via e-mail. Our apartment is great - we have two bedrooms, a loft, a roof deck, and a nice clubhouse. So think about a visit! We'll do our best to stay in touch, but would love to hear from any of you, any time. Take care and we'll talk to you soon!

Vietnam [July 21 to July 25, 2007]

Vietnam
We added Vietnam to our itinerary somewhat late. We needed visas to go there and we thought it might be better to just spend two weeks in Thailand. However, we decided to go for it, paid the $160 for our visas and booked the tickets ($145 per person from Bangkok, roundtrip). Looking back, we are very pleased that we did. We had a great time; it is a neat country. We only spent time in the north (Hanoi and Ha Long Bay), but the found landscape beautiful, the people nice enough, and most things to be very cheap. We walked out of the airport without a hotel reservation and found a taxi. We were quickly taken advantage of by a jerk of a taxi driver that demanded twice the fare on the basis that there were two people. We weren't yet accustomed to forceful arguing for such things and stupidly paid twice the going rate. Oh well - live and learn. We went from hotel to hotel, on foot, and finally found a guy that called around and found us a place with vacancy ($35 per night).



Hanoi

Hanoi, with its 3.5 million people, is a densely populated, chaotic place full of street vendors, markets, and mopeds. This part of Vietnam was formerly a French colony, which is why they (fortunately) use latin writing characters (unlike any other Asian country we've been to), meaning you can at least try to read phonetically. We stayed in the Latin Quarter, reputed to be the nicer, more tourist-friendly part of town. This photo is a typical street scene in this area. The moped volume was particularly striking - there are far more two-wheeled vehicles on the road than cars, buses, or trucks. Basically, everywhere you look, at all hours, the road is a sea of scooters.



Not only are the Vietnamese quite daredevil on scooters, but they are also very willing to load and overload them with both people and cargo. On different occasions, we saw scooters loaded with a driver, plus: up to 4 additional people, multiple pressurized gas cylinders (a frightful combination given Vietnamese driving habits), many full 5 gallon water jugs, 5 partially butchered pigs, a full-size (dead) cow, and a huge variety of other goods and products in ridiculous volumes. The really unique loads are hard to get pictures of, but here is a shot of a guy with a very modest load of mats.


We spent the first couple days wandering around Hanoi. We visited the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology, which provided a good cultural overview. After our visit, we elected to skip the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum Complex where we could have seen the preserved body of Ho Chi Minh that is stored there (except for the annual three-month period when the corpse is sent to Russia for 'maintenance') and took moped-taxis (one for each of us) to get lunch. This was followed by a particularly strong attempt by our drivers to renegotiate the terms of our ride to twice the price. We quickly learned that this is normal and to simply stonewall them.



On the subject of comical negotiation, we also visited a huge market (see picture) where Karen got herself a new "North Face" backpack for about $6 - clearly a knock-off, but probably a laughably high price to locals. Check out the size of the clothes 'shop' that Karen wandered into here.

As for food, sidewalk 'cafes' (a fire, a pot, some plastic chairs, and a cook) are the norm. We didn't take that plunge. However, it wasn't too hard to find restaurants and food that we wanted to eat. Ladies wander around all the time with the classic conical hat and the balance-style baskets hanging over one shoulder, usually full of some kind of fruit for sale. One lady slung her baskets onto Karen's shoulders to force a photo opportunity, and then demanded a tip when the picture was taken. She wasn't pleased with the $0.33 she received in return for the unsolicited exchange, but at least we got a funny photo.



Around Hanoi - Perfume Pagoda
Using our hotel as a base (we switched to the hotel with the helpful guy - 3 Star Hotel for $28/night), we traveled to a place called the Perfume Pagoda and took an overnight trip to Ha Long Bay to the east. The Perfume Pagoda is supposedly a bit of a Buddhist mecca; it was worth our entertaining day trip. It went like this: hotel pick-up, 2 hour crowded van ride, 1.5 hour row-boat ride, 20 minute gondola ride (cable car - note, as we were repeatedly told, that the gondola was of Swiss design), 1 hour hike down, strange lunch, and retracing the first three steps in reverse. The scenic photo at the top of this posting is from this trip. It really was a beautiful place. There were several adjacent shrines and temples (see picture for typical look).



The he Perfume Pagoda, is not even a pagoda - it is a cave with a shrine in it at the top of a mountain. The story goes, at least according to our guide, that the cave is the mouth of the dragon (dragons are one of four sacred creatures in Vietnamese, and probably other Asian cultures - the tortoise, dragon, phoenix, and the a slightly different version of a unicorn), and the tail of the same dragon is located somewhere in Japan. This belief apparently came from the fact that at some point in history people from Japan engaged in pilgramages to the Perfume Pagoda to pray to Buddha, after which earthquake activity in Japan became less common (due to the piety, our course). A couple pictures of the cave (which had lots of bats) and shrine area and of our guide praying to the Buddha in a temple are below. The shrine itself was in the back of the cave and surprisingly had neon lights over it - fairly out of place and very tacky.



After climbing down the mountain and eating lunch, we headed back towards our sheet metal aquatic chariot (to be described below). On the way, we passed a monestery and road under construction. This construction work, like most in developing parts of Asia, is a little rough and quite unsafe. These guys (most without shoes and all without hardhats) are working on a new monestery and these LADIES were working on the road - shoveling and moving rocks in their conical hats and flip-flops.

This brings us to the boat rides, which were probably the most memorable part of this daytrip. There was a concrete boardwalk with basic sheet-metal rowboats and old women with conical hats. Our old lady, who had to be well over 50 years old and couldn't have weighed more than 90 pounds, rowed like a Clydesdale. There was no talking, no resting, and no fluctuation in the pace of her strokes. It was awkward to have this small older woman, for 1.5 hours each way, row our boat with its four big Americans and our Vietnamese tour guide in addition to herself. We literally had 2 or 3 inches of freeboard on the boat. We sat on small wooden planks - like a 2x4 - two people per 'seat'. Those three hours on the river in the direct sunlight were undoubtedly the hottest and sweatiest hours of our entire trip around the world. Here are pictures of the boat dock and river and of the row-lady and us in the boat (no gloves).

On the way back, we made a stop at a silk factory and market. We apparently visited the same shop that Bill Clinton did on his trip to Vietnam (he was the first US president ever to visit Vietnam). We saw how silkworms are cultivated (check out the sample wall of cacoons), how silk is woven (with an automated loom), and bought some silk stuff for cheap - a shirt for $3 and two neckties for $4. One other interesting thing was the concept of snake wine. Apparently Vietnamese people drink it to enhance their virility. Check out the bottle of snake wine - you can see one of the snakes' heads towards the top, just left of center below the water line.

Ha Long Bay
We took an overnight trip to a place called Ha Long Bay, which is on the northeastern coast of Vietnam, just across the Gulf of Tonkin from western China. The place is famous for the projecting rock islands that come out of the sea. The Vietnamese associate these sharp islands with the spines on the back of a dragon under the water. We stayed on a fully-equipped junk boat, the Huy Hoang, in a fairly nice cabin with air conditioning and a private bath with shower. All meals were included, as was transportation from and to Hanoi - all for a total of $54 per person - not bad. We had lunch on the boat (see picture) - whole fish, spring rolls, and a variety of other vegetable dishes. Eating from common, central plates is normal.

The scenery is pretty amazing. We passed some cave where they apparently filmed a part of a recent James Bond movie as well as a floating village where people actually live (see picture - it looks like a bunch of barges, but they are houses and buildings).

Then we made our way to a place called Amazing Cave, which is a very large grotto/cave that they have converted into a tourist attraction. It has stalagtite and stalagmite formations that strangely resemble the four sacred animals. It also has a very fallic stone projection that the guides eagerly point out and have installed a red spotlight on it to draw your attention.


This overhead shot of a bunch of boats communicates the tourist volume in this area - it is tolerable, but clearly a hot spot. Each of those boats is a cruiser similar to ours - each with a target tourist type. We were on the young people boat with western tourists - Americans, Canadians, Dutch, Danish, and Australian. There also appeared to be more family-oriented western tourist boats, as well as others for different groups of Asians - Chinese, Korean, etc., which seemed more lively and had Karaoke late into the night. Our boat moored, as did all the rest of them, in a broad open harbor. The weather was nice and the water was warm, which made for a nice evening swim. Check our Karen's leap off the roof of the boat into the warm waters below.

That night, we chatted with our fellow guests, had a few Tiger beers, and had a nice sleep in our little cabin - one last night of vacation before our departure for China. In the morning, we motored back to Ha Long Bay harbor, had lunch, took the bus back to Hanoi, and went to the airport. Finally, we were taking our last of the series of 14 flights that took us around the world. We were Shanghai bound, where we have started our next great adventure.

Thailand [July 14 to July 21, 2007]

Thailand

Thailand has always sounded like an appealing place to go. You see it in movies, you talk to people who have gone, and you think if the food is that good, it must be a great place. So going there was an easy decision for us. Given our ambitious itinerary and limited time frame, we were forced to select just a couple places to go within Thailand. We ended up visiting Bangkok and a nice place in the beach area of southern Thailand.

Bangkok

As it was our port of entry and is an interesting place in itself, Bangkok was a good place to spend our first few days. It is a bustling Asian city, with a reasonable 6 million people. I heard from a guy who used to live there, that Bangkok today reminds him of Shanghai 10 years ago - kind of an interesting comparison. Bangkok has cars, colors, and chaos everywhere. Taxis are hot pink, three-wheeled tuk-tuk taxis are green, and most water you see is some unappealing shade of brown. Here is a shot of the river area (boats going every direction in gross water) and a typical street scene (lots of people, cars, and powerlines) - both confirming the general sense of enthusiastic disorder that permeates the city.

There is an elevated Skytrain system that is new and efficient. There are also water taxis and 'longtail' boats on the river. The longtail boats are a wonder in their own right (see picture). The term longtail seems to come from the fact that they are powered by a transplanted truck engine, transmission, and drive shaft where the drive shaft makes the long and aimable shaft on which the propeller sits. This gives them great maneuverability, but really seems kind of dangerous. Without a doubt, these boats are each unique and privately created. Most are unpleasantly loud and dripping oil or fuel or something into the river. Really, it seems that anything that moves can be driven without concern on either the road or the water in Thailand. We saw an interesting variety of home-crafted and hybrid vehicles. Check out the picture of the maroon motorcycle-cart.

Taxi drivers are pretty crazy, moped drivers are really crazy (there are scooter taxis everywhere), and the guys that drive tuk-tuks (three-wheeled moped/carriage combination vehicles) are insane. Check out the picture of one of our tuk-tuk drivers (at least the back of his head) and Bangkok traffic...also, click on the picture to enlarge it and check out the grumpy chick in the rearview.

We were somewhat surprised to find that English was a little sparse in Thailand, at least in cabs and the like, but getting around was easy enough. The city is a combination of old and new. Skyscrapers, mini-marts, street corner shrines, and classic old temples.

Karen and I spent a day wandering around the city. As we are getting accustomed to, it was HOT and HUMID (see Karen's back). We visited the Grand Palace complex, which includes several special Buddhist buildings and temples. Thai architecture is very distinct - the colors, curves, and forms are quite unique as far as we have seen in the world. Here are some pictures from within the very impressive Grand Palace area. This was an especially hot place because you have to wear clothes with sleeves and pants that go below the knees (out of respect for Buddha). We also visited the temple that houses a huge 'reclining' Buddha - 15m (45') high and 46m (150') long. This is of his toes, looking all the way down to his head (for scale, notice the little kid visible through the fence pickets in the foreground).

In terms of activities, we tried to go to Muy Thai boxing (punching and kicking), but were confused with the times and found that it was much more expensive than the Lonely Planet indicated. We came across some guys in the park playing what we describe as wiffle foot-only volleyball (see picture). This was pretty impressive. Lastly, we had a taxi drive cruise by Soi Cowboy just so we could see the racier side of Bangkok. It was there - a strip of neon-illuminated storefronts with a lot of girls strolling around in the street.

Krabi and Koh Phi Phi

After buzzing around Bangkok, four nights at a relaxed beach was a nice change. We flew down to a place called Krabi ("crabby")on our way to a more remote island. When we landed in Krabi, we learned that the boat to take us out to the island was done for the day and that our first night in the beach area would be there. It was fine - we wandered around the city, had a questionable italian meal, and went to a really crappy market that had an even crappier carnival going on. Check out the picture of the 'carnival'. That is a ground mounted, spinning plane ride in the front and a ground-mounted train ride behind. Both of them looked pretty dangerous and were powered by extension cords running across the dirt - horrible. We also saw a big dog attack a puppy here, after which some girl kicked the big dog in the face numerous times. Differences in the general regard for animals is striking sometimes.

Anyhow, the next day we took the morning boat out to Koh Phi Phi (Koh is island and the other is pronounced 'pee pee'). Despite the name, it is a very nice place and one that we would recommend. It is actually fairly close to Phuket, which is a more well known place that was struck by the 2003 (?) tsunami. Phi Phi was apparently even more wiped out than Phuket, but you wouldn't really know it.

We stayed at a place called the Viking Place Resort. It was small enough that we weren't sure we even had a reservation and they don't seem to have a phone (just random employees' cell phones). Regardless, they had a bungalow for us and it was great. It was small, simple, and pretty much on the beach. Plus, we had a hammock on the porch and a bug net over the bed, complete with one obsessive, headlamp sporting, night-time bug spotter girl to continually sound red alerts for the presence of pests (refer to picture).

It was a short walk to town. Town consists of shops, bars, hotels, restaurants, dive shops, internet cafes, and a lot of massage places. The massage work is pretty inexpensive, as are pedicures and the like, which Karen liked. We actually went to a bar that promoted itself by saying that it had live Muy Thai boxing inside the (outdoor) bar. So we went, figuring we'd make up for Bangkok. In actuality, the first match was between two kids that looked about 12. Then they called for drunk volunteers to come up and challenge each other, which happened and was pretty entertaining. Karen was fascinated and took some convincing that she should probably not volunteer to fight. Several people were so exhausted that they threw up and could hardly move after their fights.

Aside from hanging out in the village, we spent a lot of time sitting on the beach and relaxing here. The shots below are of the Viking Place Resort and the beach and view in front of it. Although the water was transparent aqua-blue, the boats here are the same longtail type as in Bangkok, and are in equally poor condition. For now, this is a beautiful island with a tolerable volume of tourists - at least when we were there. After four nights, we packed up and headed to further east to our next destination.

Dubai [July 10 to July 14, 2007]

Dubai
When we were planning our trip, we struggled with whether or not to include Dubai on the itinerary. It was expensive to get to and expensive to stay in, but we and are glad we added it. It was great to see first hand what all the fuss is about. It is essentially a fabricated community in the desert. Dubai is the modern commercial capital of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which is a very small country that borders Oman and Saudi Arabia, and sits just opposite from Iran on the Persian Gulf. Dubai Creek divides the city, which sprawls into the desert.



Given all of the publicity that Dubai seems to get, we were expecting a glistening sea of high-rise buildings. What we found was different - it is a combination of somewhat dirty low-rise streetscapes and clustered groups of skyscrapers - most of which are still under construction. Really, a street in Dubai does not look that different from the ones that we saw in Egypt and Jordan. The food is traditional Middle Eastern - schwarma, falafel, kebab, etc. - OK, but not too exciting. The picture of food (and the essential Diet Coke) was a dinner that Karen was particularly proud of herself for having eaten most of. It was chicken kebab (kind of like spiced ground-chicken globs on a stick, with some strange soup, a salad, a plate of hummus, and some tomato and cucumber garnishes - very typical.





Although the local language is Arabic, most people speak at least some English (given that it is more or less an expat haven full of Westerners). Generally, it is fairly easy to get around. Matt thought about going into this "saloon" to get his hair cut (partially because it was well over 40+ degrees C), but decided to wait.

As for the temperature - it was HOT! Intense, persistent and exhausting heat was everywhere, everyday, all day...amazing really. We looked it up on weather.com when we were there and it said 'feels like 115 degrees F' for the daytime high.


This city seems to have been made by and for people with lots of money that like to throw it around. There are countless high-end hotels and hotel/office/retail developments. It has quite a night life, but you really need to be prepared to pay for that. The airport looks like a luxury shopping center and kind of has a Vegas feel. Dubai makes a big deal out of duty-free and the fact that it is a tax-free locale. There are some local shopping spots and a lot of street markets.

This was a small market down by the creek. Since we visited mid-summer, we had the misfortune of the heat and the benefit of it being 'low season' in terms of crowds. We also visited the spice souq (market), gold souq, and others. The gold market was paritularly impressive - gold, gold, gold, and lots of other jewelry. Apparently it is one of the biggest gold markets in the world. We found human-sized cooking pots at one booth. Generally, street markets are cheap and are good for practicing the old haggle-game.


We went to the Dubai Museum, which provides some good history on the city and country and arabic culture/life. There is a well-preserved neighborhood called Bastakia, which was apparently the place with rich, Iranian merchants lived. Now it is a tourist area, but you can still see the traditional architecture. This was (the top of) a home at one time.

The tall tower is actually what they used to use for air conditioning interior spaces. The tower is open at the top on all four sides and there are two tall pieces of fabric sewn together at their middles to form a criss-cross. The wind, coming from any direction, is caught and routed down into the house by the V formed in the fabric criss-cross. These houses look a bit different from the Dubai that we are used to seeing on TV - such as the Burj al Arab, the big building that looks like a sailboat and is right on the water. We tried to go look at it, but it is highly secure and unless you are going to go up for a meal or drink at the top (you pay some huge cover in advance, which gets applied to your bill) you can't get in. So, we settled for a few pictures from a distance.



Overall, our reaction to Dubai was mixed. It was too hot. Culturally, it is interesting, but it is pretty Westernized (which is probably OK because the culture in Arabic countries is fairly strong). The prices for most things you would actually want are quite high. It has lots to do, but the activities are very contrived and aren't cheap - indoor skiing, desert camping, camel riding, amusement parks, desert jeep tours, and super-shopping. One sort of interesting thing that we tried to do and (fortunately) failed was to go watch the camel races. It is something like horse racing, but with camels and in a much larger track. A particularly vocal cab driver shared a little more information about the 'sport' that made us glad to miss it. Apparently the practice of smuggling children in from Pakistan and Bangladesh to be the jockeys is common. They are desirable jockeys as they are cheap, small and light, and can be made to cry so that the camels are scared and run faster. The problem is that they often fall off and can be injured or killed - not so nice.

This is a shot of the city and Dubai Creek. Looking back, Dubai was a worthwhile stop, but after a few days we were ready to head further East.