last day in korea!!

my asian adventure is coming to an end! it is very sad for me to go back to reality. here are some highlights from the last days...

yesterday, i went to a korean sauna (also called public baths) - sauna is pretty big here (and cheap) - you can pretty much entertain yourself in a sauna facility all day - typical sauna locations have several sauna rooms, a steam room, jacuzzi, massage facility, relaxation room, tv/dvd room, internet gaming area, beauty salon, gym - HUGE.

sein and i also met our MBA friend, kenny suk, for lunch. we had indian food - korean indian was quite tasty.

ok, off to the airport! i will post more from home...

olympic park and the han river

today i ventured out to the site of the 1988 summer olympics. the olympic area is now simply a park. the area also houses an olympic museum with facts about the seoul and other olympic venues. pictured is hodori, the seoul olympics mascot. sein says that hodori was all the rage during the '80s - everyone had hodori stationary, backpacks, tshirts...

i later went to the han river for a boat cruise and to check out views of the city. as my luck would have it on this trip, it was cloudy and overcast today so my views of the city were slightly obstructed. the han river runs right in the middle of the city, dividing seoul in half. it is considered more desirable to reside south of the han river and often koreans, when you first meet them, will ask you which neighborhood you live in to determine whether you live in a desirable (south of the river) location or an undesirable one (north of the river).

korean folk village and world cup stadium

sein and i went to a korean folk village this weekend to basically check out the old school korean heritage lifestyle replicas - following are pictures of korean acrobatics and a korean traditional dance. really colorful and entertaining.

while sein was hard at work, i ventured out on the subway to the world cup stadium and park. the WC stadium was built on top of an old landfill - the city government regentrified the land and turned it into a functional eco-friendly location. while there are no football games played at the stadium, it is used as a multi-story department store (with a supermarket on the bottom floor)

annyeoung haseio - greetings from seoul

this is my last stop - seoul korea - i will be overstaying my welcome here by parking myself for 10 days. i am here visiting my MBA buddy, sein. sein and her family have been the most gracious hosts, i am having such a great time. the city is similar to other major asian cities (singapore, HK) - has excellent public transport - the people are really friendly and the food is excellent! i am in love with kimchi (pickled cabbage) and dokkbuchi (rice cakes in spicy sauce, real simple peasant food). i dont think korean food gets the credit it deserves next to thai, vietnamese and chinese food - but it is really flavorful and extremely healthy (the rice is my favorite in asia so far).

during my first day i went to 2 of the popular korean palaces to see the changing of the guards and insa-dong - one of seoul's traditional cultural streets (they have one of the only starbucks with non-english signage) and simply hung around.

local sights of beijing

i realized that with a population of billions, you have to bite and claw your way around beijing. after the incident with the cab driver, i think i have learned to play their game...i forgot one little story from yesterday's post of the great wall - i think the stereotype about the driving here is true - when my minibus showed up yesterday to take my group to the great wall, the driver backed into a street sign and broke it in half. though the driving is crazy in every other asian city i have visited (most of india, cambodia, thailand, vietnam), i would characterize the driving in those cities as 'comfortable chaos' - here, i think the drivers are all a few fries short of a happy meal.

anyways, i went out to visit the most popular sights of the city, one of the biggest is pictured, tianaman square and the gateway to the forgotton city. as you can see, mao is

quite popular. i also went to a chinese acrobatics show. highly recommended.

the GREAT wall

the great wall stretches over 6400 km...there are many parts of the great wall that are open to visitors - the most popular with the tourists is badaling - badaling is fully restored and pretty crowded. another popular site (where you can toboggan your way partly down the wall) is called mutianyu - mutianyu is also partially restored. i chose the route to the wall that is slightly less travelled - it starts at a part called jinshaling and you walk (lots of steep upward and some downward climbing) 10 km to another section, simatai. this climb is highly recommended - it has beautiful views from 30 watch towers and is for the most part, totally unrestored. super cool.

beijing welcomes you...

this is the signage i saw getting off the train in beijing - 'beijing welcomes you' (since beijing is the site of the 2008 olympics - slated to start on 8-8-08)...let me tell you, beijing welcomes you by having a cab driver ripping you off on the way in. they are totally ruthless in the lengths they will go to when they price goods and services. beijing also has some of the most aggressive panhandlers i have ever encountered.

this place is also different from all the other asian cities i have been in since it has (in my opinion) the worst public transportation system i have seen. beijing proper is HUGE (i think more than 1.5 hrs to get from one end to the other) and they make it hard to navigate around. on the other hand, the sightseeing here is pretty spectacular - there is TONS to see, dont know if i will have enough time to cover it all. off to the great wall tomorrow...

28 hrs by bus

the bus ride from nanning to beijing was surprisingly quite pleasant. i had a very nice berth in my "hard sleeper" - 2nd class bed, basically. the pics are proof that the bed is actually not so bad - i went for the top berth because 1. it is the cheapest and 2. lower chance of getting your stuff mugged. i made friends with a chinese girl who is a college student (who has stronger engrish skills than rirrian - i still wonder how she graduated...) and helped me read the chinese on the timetable so that i got on the train...the 28 hrs passed by pretty quick - i spent much of it teaching 6 chinese people how to play a cardgame and the rest with a chinese kid who was so excited to see an american.

Ni how! (hello) from Nanning, China

this is my first stop on the way to beijing. i was unable to get a ticket on the direct train, hanoi to beijing so i will have to piece my way over - i took a 9 hour bus ride from hanoi this morning up to this small town in china which is supposedly called the "gateway to southeast asia" (probably since it is one of the major border crossings from china into SE asia, i assume). it looks like i will be on a 28 hr train from nanning over to beijing, eek!

here are some simple pictures of the scenery from the bus and some pics from the town...

last evening in hanoi

a benefit of traveling alone is that you can do what you want when you want to - so i chose to attend the water puppetry for the second time...don't know why, but i love puppet shows.

an added bonus to my trip to hanoi is that i was able to meet up with my good friends, arrin and ela katz! it just so turned out that our traveling paths happened to overlap in hanoi so we met up for dinner. having spent so much time in china, arrin and ela helped me out with some chinese phrases - most important being "i dont eat meat" and "that is too expensive" - we shall see how far that gets me through the country.

i am leaving tomorrow by bus for nanning, china and then onwards to beijing (not exactly sure how i plan to get there...) - so stay tuned!

good morning, vietnam

as you might have been able to tell in the previous post - i am in vietnam now. hanoi, actually. i was surprised to see that the people actually do wear the cone-shaped hats - turns out that they are made of a straw that has very strong spf properties so it acts like natural sunscreen.

the scenery here is absolutely stunning - i am very sad that time is running short and i will not be able to explore any other part of this country. today i hit up the vietnamese water puppet theatre and the temple of literature. some fun facts about the temple of literature: it was originally built in 1070 to honor the country's scholars and literary folk - it was later converted into vietnam's first university. the names of the school's graduates are posted on stone scripts.

halong bay

i went on a 2 day boat cruise to halong bay - the trip included a really nice cabin room and awesome vietnamese veg food - i stuffed my face, of course. the pictures here don't really show exactly how beautiful the scenery is. i started the day visiting some of the caves of halong bay then went kayaking and swimming in the bay. many of you would be interested to hear that i think i might have conquered the fear of otters because i actually swam around without the life vest. i must admit, this kayaking experience was actually better than most - my kayaking partner actually had some idea how to manuever a kayak - much better than my harrowing experience in the 10th grade.

thai cooking school

another really popular activity in chiang mai other than trekking is to take a cooking course. since i am totally in love with thai food (and it is pretty much all gluten free) i signed up for a course taught by a woman and her husband in their home. they start off by taking you to the thai open food market to pick out your ingredients before you start cooking -- you get to choose your own (wide) menu so i chose the following: massaman curry, coconut soup, mushroom tofu spicy salad, green bean stir fry, pad see ew (wide noodle stirfry) and steamed banana cakes. i also got a cookbook i can keep.

the cooking (especially many ingredients) is pretty similar to indian food so i had a nice head start from the group -- especially when the instructor started yelling to the other students "stir faster! you too slow! fast! fast!" - quite entertaining.

i have just returned from my 2 day trek into the jungles of the pai region of northern thailand. pai is about 50 km from the border to burma. this trek was awesome, probably the coolest thing i have done so far on my trip. we hiked about 3.5 hrs (most of it uphill - i turned out to be in better shape than i thought ) to a waterfall for a swim - then hiked about an hour to our base camp in a hill tribe village to have dinner (food was excellent) and camp for the evening. we slept on sleep mats in a hut and had an old school campfire. the next morning, we came back down the mountain on an elephant - i sat in the front, and considering all the mental things i have done in my life, this might have been once of the dumbest. the elephants are trained but i would use the word trained lightly - they don't always respond to direction and of course my group's elephant was definitely the most non-cooperative of the elephants. while i was on it, it head butt another elephant, and then once smooshed its head into the backside of the other elephant with my leg stuck in the middle - painful. nonetheless, the ride was super cool.

after the ride, we had lunch then got on bamboo rafts and floated down a small river that took us back to our truck for the ride home.

i am off to an authentic thai cooking class today so details on that later!

bangkok

nothing too different in bangkok, it is pretty much like most of the other asian cities - busy and bustling. i simply went to the 2 main tourist attractions, the grand palace and reclining buddha. since thailand is mainly buddist, there are hundreds of wats (buddist temples) scattered across the city that one can go visit but i personally am all templed out - the temples/mosques of india, angkor, singapore, malaysia have all worn me out so i skipped those...

it rained all day so i spent it getting thai massages (getting too addicted to these), shopping and laying low before heading up to chiang mai on my 2 day trek! here is a funny picture of the ronald mcdonalds in thailand - he is using the typical gesture to say hello...

koh tao

hello, this time from koh tao, thailand. koh tao is supposedly divers paradise but the reality is that it is the place to go to get your diving certification because it is so cheap. i did 4 dives here and though it was pretty, i have seen better in malaysia. the waters were actually quite crowded with divers as well - once i thought i saw more divers than fish. sad.

the food here though is fantastic. i cant get enough of the curry. sorry for the short post, off to bangkok.

the waterfalls of koh samui

i took an overnight (surprisingly, very luxurious) bus from the perehentian islands out to koh samui, an island in southern thailand (koh samui is on eastern thailand so not really affected by tsunami). in order to get the good rate for my ticket, i had to share my ride to the malaysian border with 2 other backpackers - 2 little british babies (they are 19) traveling on their gap year.

the little brits and i decided to rent a car to drive around the island seeing as we arrived too late to book any of the trekking tours for the day - dont know what is worse, me driving on the wrong side of the road or me trusting these babies with a car...i decided that as scary as it might be, better for me to drive...

we stopped at 3 different waterfalls on the island and got to swim in them as well - enjoy the pretty pictures!

we also managed to get tickets for muai thai (boxing)! it was very very cool. especially since the coach gave us some boxing lessons afterwards.