Hello internetland,
This will be a bit of a lengthy post as I discuss my trip but I hope it's interesting for you. As usual, I try to tell stories in the captions of my pictures so if you want the full experience then check them out. There are 3 folders for it: Trip with Brian, Trip after Brian, and underwater pics.
It's March which means my 2 month holiday for Chinese New Year is over and I'm back to work.
It was a perfect time for me to have a holiday. At the end of the year zzf and I ended our relationship. We had been together over 3 years and it had seemed to be going really well but she started working full-time in the fall and things started to go downhill when she was suddenly faced with real life. In the end she had a lot of fun visiting Canada but decided she wants to live near her parents for the rest of their lives and never really travel at all. Her parents are only 50 so this could be a very long time still. We decided that, although we really liked each other, a future together just made no sense. So it was really hard for me and the chance to get away was very welcome. We still talk sometimes but much more rarely, if you are someone who has emailed her before, you're welcome to continue that. We're still friends but things have obviously changed.
So, on to happier things. Brian Martin had been mulling over the idea of joining me in SE Asia for my holiday. We decided to go to the Philippines but the cheapest flights from Toronto all seemed to go through Beijing. It seemed weird for him to come to China and not come out and look around a bit. You can stay in Beijing for 72 hours without a visa if you have proof of a flight out at the end so we did that.
Of course he wanted to go to The Great Wall. The thing is, I've been to the wall 5 times before because when people visit they always want to go to the wall so I take them there. It's always fun to take people and experience a cool spot with people I care about. However this time I told him I wanted to go to a new section of the wall and he was fine with that.
So I looked up some sections of the wall on the internet and found one that was supposed to have a lake that had be dammed up and actually rose over the wall in certain parts. It sounded cool, but in Beijing everyone I talked to had never heard of it. Brian trusted me enough to go for it anyway so we took several commuter buses. At the end there were only 4 of us left on the bus. It dropped us off in a huge, entirely empty, parking lot. We looked around but started walking in a direction that made sense to us.
There were tonnes of tourist shops as we walked along. Every single one of them was closed.
We continued on and eventually came to a ticket place. The lady selling tickets was actually asleep but we woke her up and paid. At the gate where we actually give the ticket, a guy ran out to take them who told me that we were the very first 2 people there that day and it was about 10:30 in the morning. The other 2 people on the bus were a bit behind us but for the first hour or so there were only 4 people in the entire, massive, area. Later some locals arrived to play on the ice but that was about it.
I'm sure you've all seen pictures like this:
While it's never been that crazy when I've been there, it's always still been quite busy. Compare that to having NO ONE within eyesight, it was definitely strange.
It was a gorgeous area, with a dam actually causing a lake to form above the wall. In the summer you'd need to take a boat around but it was so cold that it was frozen over and we could just walk anywhere. Take a look at my pictures of it for more comments.
After a whirlwind tour of Beijing, we caught a red-eye flight to Manila where we landed at 5am. We took a nap then went to the Mall of Asia here which Wikipedia says is the 11th biggest mall in the world (West Edmonton is #16). We watched Star Wars there, then flew to Puerto Princessa, Palawan the next morning.
We were recommended to go to a restaurant. However, once we sat down, it became quite clear that this was a specialty, expensive, restaurant. There was one item that seemed reasonable in cost and description. It was called "tuna salad". This sounded reasonable so we each ordered one. However, when it arrived:
The tuna was raw, there was some strange kid of seaweed that seemed to consist of little green balls that exploded when you bit into them, various strange fruits, and cashews.
The look on Brian's face was priceless. I shrugged and ate most of mine. He was hesitant but he tackled it and managed to eat a good portion. I commented that 5 years ago he would never have been willing to eat that. His response: "5 years ago? 30 minutes ago I was contemplating just leaving it here, you're witnessing growth before your eyes". Good job B!
Our hotel was DIRECTLY under the path for landing planes but it wasn't a very busy airport and it stopped in the evening so that wasn't much of an annoyance. What WAS an annoyance however is that Karaoke is incredibly popular in the Philippines, however most of the singers are... less than stellar. People rent Karaoke machines and BLAST the music for the entire neighbourhood to hear. Apparently it's a massive insult to ask them to turn it down. One night, it was so bad that even the owners were cringing. Some guy was happily "singing" to endless songs for hours. We tried to go out for the evening but he was still going strong when we got back. Fortunately he did eventually stop.
We rented motorbikes in Puerto and headed for El Nido which was about a 300km journey over the island. It was a pretty nice ride but it took about 6 hours (these were 125cc bikes) and we were sore by the end of it. Their tiny gas tanks also required filling quite often but, fortunately, near every house we passed sold gasoline in old coke bottles so there was never a fear of running out.
El Nido was gorgeous with high cliffs everywhere and beautiful sunsets. Since we still had the bikes we got to get around to a bunch of cool spots which you can see in my pictures. The main thing we did in El Nido was go diving. Brian had bought a GoPro in China for $50 (I'm sure it was real) and wanted to test it. It actually worked quite well and we had some good shots. We did 3 boat dives, so nothing as crazy as a few years ago when we lived on a boat in Thailand and did 14 dives but it was still fun. We saw some turtles, lots of coral, and various fish.
The brochure for El Nido stated that there would be Caribao races on "The 4th Sunday of January". We happened to be there for this time and were really excited since it seemed like a great event as caribao are everywhere on Palawan island and used for farming and pulling wagons. However, when we got there we were told it was some other day, we were very disappointed but we did manage to find a massive cave which, apparently, archaeology students still use every year and routinely find new bones. At home this would be off-limits to nearly everyone, but here we could go exploring so some local guides showed us around.
We rode back to Puerto then flew to Cebu City, Cebu. We stayed here a few days before catching a bus and heading to Moalboal which is a village I went to last year and loved it. I have a friend there who showed us lots of cool spots. We also went to a cock fight. B had, of course, never been to such a thing. The guy beside us kept trying to get us to bet. I still have no idea how the betting works. As far as I can tell, everyone just yells for 2 minutes, then the birds fight, then people throw money around.
We hung out here for a few days but, eventually, B had to head home.
I stayed around Moalboal a few more days then went to Cebu before flying back to Manila and then Taipei.
I had really forgotten about the fact that I was going to Taiwan when I packed for this trip so I had very few warm clothes. So I needed to do some shopping but I found a pair of pants and figured I'd make do with the rest.
I went to Taiwan with absolutely no idea what I'd be doing other than knowing I was flying out in 10 days. The beauty of staying in hostels is that there is almost always a helpful person there who can give ideas. Within a few hours of landing in Taipei I had been talking to the hostel owner and I had a plan for where I'd be going during my time. The most interesting one that I was looking forward to was the Yanshui Beehive festival, but we'll get to that later.
In Taipei I went to the main attraction, Taipei 101, but I went to the starbucks on the 35th floor rather than pay the money to go to the top. You need to make a reservation but the nice lady at the hostel helped with that. It's much cheaper to do this plus you get food and drink and a nice, relaxing view of the city.
I also went to a book exhibition. You can read more about it in the captions of my pictures.
A few days later I took a train to Hualien, a city on the East coast in the mountains. The hostel was almost entirely empty but I rented a motorbike and went to Taroko National Park for a day. It was gorgeous and I got to ride all over the mountains. Being on a bike was amazing. SO many tourists were on buses and always were waiting around but I could go anywhere. It was a really fun day and I even managed to avoid any rain!
After going to the national park, the next day was raining and I had nothing else really to do in that city so I took the day "off" and stayed inside watching tv all day. It was relaxing.
After that, I hopped on a train to Tainan. I already had a ticket but it was a 5 hour ride and the ticket said "no seat". I had gone a few days earlier to the station to see if this could be changed as I wasn't really keen to stand for 5 hours. The girl at the ticket window managed to break it into 3 tickets on the same train with the first and last having a seat but for 1.5 hours in the middle I'd have to stand. Better than 5 hours!
In Taipei, I had been talking about this crazy beehive festival and 3 other guys who were at the hostel thought it sounded fun so we all agreed to meet in Tainan.
I was the only one in the group with any Mandarin speaking ability but they seemed to trust me to get them out to the tiny village where the festival was happening. We knew we needed armour so we bought some very stylish helmets and off we went.
As soon as we arrived in Yanshui, it was clear we were in the right places as fireworks were going off everywhere even though it was still daytime. We found a local textile shop and I managed to explain that we wanted some fabric attached to our helmets to stop bottle rockets from getting up under the visors and exploding.
As far as we could tell, people would take small firecracke
I asked a local man where the main event was happening. He seemed genuinely confused even though he spoke English quite well. "Everywhere" he said. Well, obviously you can't have fireworks be everywhere so I asked about down a certain road. He said yes. I said what about here. He said yes. Turns out you CAN have fireworks literally everywhere. EVERY street of this town was packed with people. Groups would appear out of nowhere pushing palanquins with figurines inside and then firecrackers would start exploding at their feet. Then large beehives full of bottle rockets would get rolled out and the crowd would get tense and all turn their backs and get really for the deluge. It would get lit and everyone would sort of run in place to stop them exploding on their feet. Those things hurt when they hit and explode. I have a few burn marks on the sweater I was wearing. We saw one building on fire, it was growing really fast but people were ready and it got put out before it could grow uncontrollable. I can't possibly describe to you just how insane this whole thing was but I did upload 3 videos to youtube which you can check out. Here is the main one (below). Here is the short finale and here is a close up video.
I've never been part of anything as crazy as that but, as my mom put it, when I was younger Brian and I bought a bunch of used microwaves and put all kinds of things inside them to try and blow them up so this didn't seem that weird for her.
Lastly, I went back to Taipei and stayed at a hostel near the airport as it was also near the Taiwan lantern festival. There was NO ONE in this hostel. Even the owner was rarely around so I had the place to myself. It was a weird feeling. The weather was quite ugly here, being cold and wet unlike the south with the beehive festival which was actually quite warm.
The lantern festival was massive and there were lots of very colourful lanterns. It was cold out but it was still a neat thing to do on the last day of my trip.
It was once again an amazing time. Traveling with B was amazing and it's great to be able to share those memories with a good friend. Once he left I managed to meet other people when traveling and I had experiences that I realize most people never have.
Now that I'm back I need to begin to think about the future. China has a very strange rule that you're not allowed to work as a teacher for more than 5 years. This has always been ignored in the past as it makes no sense, why would you get rid of teachers who are experienced? The only answer I've heard is that it's so that teachers don't get "lazy". Apparently they don't trust companies to ditch bad teachers. My boss claims that since I've updated my training and always get glowing reviews from the school that it won't be an issue but he seems to just be making up that rational as no one else has ever mentioned that.
Anyway, this being China, there is simply no way to get a straight answer about whether this rule with affect me or not. I've asked about 10 different people who should know with certainty about it and I've gotten 10 different answers. Right now I've asked my school to look into it. I believe I shouldn't have any issue staying in China if I wish to do so but I'm not sure if I'll be able to stay at my current job or city if this rule gets applied.
So, it's a bit of a tumultuous time for me right now. I always appreciate hearing from all of you. WHen you leave comments on my pictures or on this blog I always read it. Emails are of course always welcome too!
Thanks for being part of my life!
Josh
PS I could still use 2 more email buddies. If you're interested in meeting people from other cultures and would be willing to email a Chinese college student once a week from now until the end of June then please send me a message.
This will be a bit of a lengthy post as I discuss my trip but I hope it's interesting for you. As usual, I try to tell stories in the captions of my pictures so if you want the full experience then check them out. There are 3 folders for it: Trip with Brian, Trip after Brian, and underwater pics.
It's March which means my 2 month holiday for Chinese New Year is over and I'm back to work.
It was a perfect time for me to have a holiday. At the end of the year zzf and I ended our relationship. We had been together over 3 years and it had seemed to be going really well but she started working full-time in the fall and things started to go downhill when she was suddenly faced with real life. In the end she had a lot of fun visiting Canada but decided she wants to live near her parents for the rest of their lives and never really travel at all. Her parents are only 50 so this could be a very long time still. We decided that, although we really liked each other, a future together just made no sense. So it was really hard for me and the chance to get away was very welcome. We still talk sometimes but much more rarely, if you are someone who has emailed her before, you're welcome to continue that. We're still friends but things have obviously changed.
So, on to happier things. Brian Martin had been mulling over the idea of joining me in SE Asia for my holiday. We decided to go to the Philippines but the cheapest flights from Toronto all seemed to go through Beijing. It seemed weird for him to come to China and not come out and look around a bit. You can stay in Beijing for 72 hours without a visa if you have proof of a flight out at the end so we did that.
Of course he wanted to go to The Great Wall. The thing is, I've been to the wall 5 times before because when people visit they always want to go to the wall so I take them there. It's always fun to take people and experience a cool spot with people I care about. However this time I told him I wanted to go to a new section of the wall and he was fine with that.
 |
| nothing open and not a person in sight |
There were tonnes of tourist shops as we walked along. Every single one of them was closed.
We continued on and eventually came to a ticket place. The lady selling tickets was actually asleep but we woke her up and paid. At the gate where we actually give the ticket, a guy ran out to take them who told me that we were the very first 2 people there that day and it was about 10:30 in the morning. The other 2 people on the bus were a bit behind us but for the first hour or so there were only 4 people in the entire, massive, area. Later some locals arrived to play on the ice but that was about it.
I'm sure you've all seen pictures like this:
While it's never been that crazy when I've been there, it's always still been quite busy. Compare that to having NO ONE within eyesight, it was definitely strange.It was a gorgeous area, with a dam actually causing a lake to form above the wall. In the summer you'd need to take a boat around but it was so cold that it was frozen over and we could just walk anywhere. Take a look at my pictures of it for more comments.
After a whirlwind tour of Beijing, we caught a red-eye flight to Manila where we landed at 5am. We took a nap then went to the Mall of Asia here which Wikipedia says is the 11th biggest mall in the world (West Edmonton is #16). We watched Star Wars there, then flew to Puerto Princessa, Palawan the next morning.
We were recommended to go to a restaurant. However, once we sat down, it became quite clear that this was a specialty, expensive, restaurant. There was one item that seemed reasonable in cost and description. It was called "tuna salad". This sounded reasonable so we each ordered one. However, when it arrived:
The look on Brian's face was priceless. I shrugged and ate most of mine. He was hesitant but he tackled it and managed to eat a good portion. I commented that 5 years ago he would never have been willing to eat that. His response: "5 years ago? 30 minutes ago I was contemplating just leaving it here, you're witnessing growth before your eyes". Good job B!
Our hotel was DIRECTLY under the path for landing planes but it wasn't a very busy airport and it stopped in the evening so that wasn't much of an annoyance. What WAS an annoyance however is that Karaoke is incredibly popular in the Philippines, however most of the singers are... less than stellar. People rent Karaoke machines and BLAST the music for the entire neighbourhood to hear. Apparently it's a massive insult to ask them to turn it down. One night, it was so bad that even the owners were cringing. Some guy was happily "singing" to endless songs for hours. We tried to go out for the evening but he was still going strong when we got back. Fortunately he did eventually stop.
We rented motorbikes in Puerto and headed for El Nido which was about a 300km journey over the island. It was a pretty nice ride but it took about 6 hours (these were 125cc bikes) and we were sore by the end of it. Their tiny gas tanks also required filling quite often but, fortunately, near every house we passed sold gasoline in old coke bottles so there was never a fear of running out.
El Nido was gorgeous with high cliffs everywhere and beautiful sunsets. Since we still had the bikes we got to get around to a bunch of cool spots which you can see in my pictures. The main thing we did in El Nido was go diving. Brian had bought a GoPro in China for $50 (I'm sure it was real) and wanted to test it. It actually worked quite well and we had some good shots. We did 3 boat dives, so nothing as crazy as a few years ago when we lived on a boat in Thailand and did 14 dives but it was still fun. We saw some turtles, lots of coral, and various fish.The brochure for El Nido stated that there would be Caribao races on "The 4th Sunday of January". We happened to be there for this time and were really excited since it seemed like a great event as caribao are everywhere on Palawan island and used for farming and pulling wagons. However, when we got there we were told it was some other day, we were very disappointed but we did manage to find a massive cave which, apparently, archaeology students still use every year and routinely find new bones. At home this would be off-limits to nearly everyone, but here we could go exploring so some local guides showed us around.
We rode back to Puerto then flew to Cebu City, Cebu. We stayed here a few days before catching a bus and heading to Moalboal which is a village I went to last year and loved it. I have a friend there who showed us lots of cool spots. We also went to a cock fight. B had, of course, never been to such a thing. The guy beside us kept trying to get us to bet. I still have no idea how the betting works. As far as I can tell, everyone just yells for 2 minutes, then the birds fight, then people throw money around.We hung out here for a few days but, eventually, B had to head home.
I stayed around Moalboal a few more days then went to Cebu before flying back to Manila and then Taipei.
I had really forgotten about the fact that I was going to Taiwan when I packed for this trip so I had very few warm clothes. So I needed to do some shopping but I found a pair of pants and figured I'd make do with the rest.
I went to Taiwan with absolutely no idea what I'd be doing other than knowing I was flying out in 10 days. The beauty of staying in hostels is that there is almost always a helpful person there who can give ideas. Within a few hours of landing in Taipei I had been talking to the hostel owner and I had a plan for where I'd be going during my time. The most interesting one that I was looking forward to was the Yanshui Beehive festival, but we'll get to that later.
In Taipei I went to the main attraction, Taipei 101, but I went to the starbucks on the 35th floor rather than pay the money to go to the top. You need to make a reservation but the nice lady at the hostel helped with that. It's much cheaper to do this plus you get food and drink and a nice, relaxing view of the city.I also went to a book exhibition. You can read more about it in the captions of my pictures.
A few days later I took a train to Hualien, a city on the East coast in the mountains. The hostel was almost entirely empty but I rented a motorbike and went to Taroko National Park for a day. It was gorgeous and I got to ride all over the mountains. Being on a bike was amazing. SO many tourists were on buses and always were waiting around but I could go anywhere. It was a really fun day and I even managed to avoid any rain!After going to the national park, the next day was raining and I had nothing else really to do in that city so I took the day "off" and stayed inside watching tv all day. It was relaxing.
After that, I hopped on a train to Tainan. I already had a ticket but it was a 5 hour ride and the ticket said "no seat". I had gone a few days earlier to the station to see if this could be changed as I wasn't really keen to stand for 5 hours. The girl at the ticket window managed to break it into 3 tickets on the same train with the first and last having a seat but for 1.5 hours in the middle I'd have to stand. Better than 5 hours!
In Taipei, I had been talking about this crazy beehive festival and 3 other guys who were at the hostel thought it sounded fun so we all agreed to meet in Tainan.I was the only one in the group with any Mandarin speaking ability but they seemed to trust me to get them out to the tiny village where the festival was happening. We knew we needed armour so we bought some very stylish helmets and off we went.
As soon as we arrived in Yanshui, it was clear we were in the right places as fireworks were going off everywhere even though it was still daytime. We found a local textile shop and I managed to explain that we wanted some fabric attached to our helmets to stop bottle rockets from getting up under the visors and exploding.
As far as we could tell, people would take small firecracke
I asked a local man where the main event was happening. He seemed genuinely confused even though he spoke English quite well. "Everywhere" he said. Well, obviously you can't have fireworks be everywhere so I asked about down a certain road. He said yes. I said what about here. He said yes. Turns out you CAN have fireworks literally everywhere. EVERY street of this town was packed with people. Groups would appear out of nowhere pushing palanquins with figurines inside and then firecrackers would start exploding at their feet. Then large beehives full of bottle rockets would get rolled out and the crowd would get tense and all turn their backs and get really for the deluge. It would get lit and everyone would sort of run in place to stop them exploding on their feet. Those things hurt when they hit and explode. I have a few burn marks on the sweater I was wearing. We saw one building on fire, it was growing really fast but people were ready and it got put out before it could grow uncontrollable. I can't possibly describe to you just how insane this whole thing was but I did upload 3 videos to youtube which you can check out. Here is the main one (below). Here is the short finale and here is a close up video.
I've never been part of anything as crazy as that but, as my mom put it, when I was younger Brian and I bought a bunch of used microwaves and put all kinds of things inside them to try and blow them up so this didn't seem that weird for her.
Lastly, I went back to Taipei and stayed at a hostel near the airport as it was also near the Taiwan lantern festival. There was NO ONE in this hostel. Even the owner was rarely around so I had the place to myself. It was a weird feeling. The weather was quite ugly here, being cold and wet unlike the south with the beehive festival which was actually quite warm.
The lantern festival was massive and there were lots of very colourful lanterns. It was cold out but it was still a neat thing to do on the last day of my trip.It was once again an amazing time. Traveling with B was amazing and it's great to be able to share those memories with a good friend. Once he left I managed to meet other people when traveling and I had experiences that I realize most people never have.
Now that I'm back I need to begin to think about the future. China has a very strange rule that you're not allowed to work as a teacher for more than 5 years. This has always been ignored in the past as it makes no sense, why would you get rid of teachers who are experienced? The only answer I've heard is that it's so that teachers don't get "lazy". Apparently they don't trust companies to ditch bad teachers. My boss claims that since I've updated my training and always get glowing reviews from the school that it won't be an issue but he seems to just be making up that rational as no one else has ever mentioned that.
Anyway, this being China, there is simply no way to get a straight answer about whether this rule with affect me or not. I've asked about 10 different people who should know with certainty about it and I've gotten 10 different answers. Right now I've asked my school to look into it. I believe I shouldn't have any issue staying in China if I wish to do so but I'm not sure if I'll be able to stay at my current job or city if this rule gets applied.
So, it's a bit of a tumultuous time for me right now. I always appreciate hearing from all of you. WHen you leave comments on my pictures or on this blog I always read it. Emails are of course always welcome too!
Thanks for being part of my life!
Josh
PS I could still use 2 more email buddies. If you're interested in meeting people from other cultures and would be willing to email a Chinese college student once a week from now until the end of June then please send me a message.
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