I got back to Haikou last night. Today has been a day of non-stop cleaning. Apparently due to the climate or the proximity of the ocean or whatever, when you leave for a month and come back, everything gets mildewy. It's something all the returning students are dealing with. So I've been unpacking, doing laundry, washing formerly clean dishes, sweeping and resweeping, airing out shoes and blankets in the sun, wondering what to do about ants, unloading and reloading shelves and wiping down surfaces all day long. Molin's been helping me, and between the two of us we've probably put in 8 or 9 work hours. All I have left to do is a few more dishes, and then the balcony, which is the worst area and which I haven't even begun to think about yet. And then once my clothes are dry (they're hanging up now), put those away. (And I cleaned my room pretty good before I left.)

After it being near freezing up in Zhejiang, with no heater and all that, it's nice to be back here where the sun is shining and the current temperature is 90 degrees Fahrenheit. (February? I guess winter's over.)

Today is the fifteenth day of the new lunar year - the first full moon of the year - which is also a holiday in China. It's sort of like the New Year celebrations last for these two weeks. People generally like to be with their families on this day too, but New Year's Day (a.k.a. the Spring Festival) was so late this year that a lot of students had to come back to school by now, and can't spend today with their families. To represent the full moon, people eat round things today (same as at the mid-autumn festival, but each holiday has different round food that is traditional for it - at mid-Autumn day it's moon cakes, which are little round pastries filled with sweet or savory innards; for today, I'm not sure, but I've heard a lot of talk about glutinous rice balls -- which, I might add, I really like).

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First, a correction, as was helpfully pointed out in the comments section of the previous entry: the currency of Macao is the Pataca, not the Pitaca.

Here are the pictures I uploaded yesterday. I'll give brief explanations for some, but mostly you should imagine them appropriately interspersed with the text of the previous entry.

A public square (see the colonial architecture?) decorated for the Lunar New Year:


Chinese and Portuguese. The Portuguese arrived in the 1500s, and didn't leave until December 1999.






Seeing the little cathedral above, I felt like I was back in downtown Lima, just off the Plaza de Armas. But in other areas of Macao, it looks pretty different. Some areas, like the one pictured below, look straight out of Hong Kong. (Although the sign for the "Lavanderia" is a giveaway.)



But the defining feature of Macao for many tourists is the casinos. This first one is shaped like a giant golden pineapple.





Below, inside the shopping mall/casino/hotel known as The Venetian. The building facades, and sky, are fake -- but the canal, boat, and singing gondolier are real.





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I am now in Zhuhai, Guangdong, China, visiting my friend Victoria. It's where she lives, but it's also the port of entry into Macao (also spelled Macau; in Chinese it's called Aomen). In fact, I would say Zhuhai and Macao are basically part of the same metropolitan area; it's just that one is in China and the other is Macao. So yesterday, we took a day trip to Macao (that is, basically, across the city).

Macao, like Hong Kong, is a "Special Administrative Region" of China. Which is to say, it's not really part of China. It's arguably even less a part of China than, say, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands is a part of the USA. (And did you even know that was part of the USA?) What do I mean by that? Consider that the CNMI, as well as Guam and other territories we don't typically think of as part of the USA, still use the US dollar, don't require a visa or passport for US citizens to travel to (well, okay, they do require proof of US citizenship to enter, of which a passport is an acceptable form, so it's not exactly the same as traveling to, say, Kentucky, but still), etc.

In Macao (and Hong Kong), you (whether you're Chinese or foreign) have to go through immigration and get your passport stamped when you cross the border going to or from China proper. If you, as a foreigner, want to travel to China, then into Macao or Hong Kong, and then back to China, you will need a multiple-entry Chinese visa, not just a single-entry one, because going into one of those territories -- even though they're considered "part of China" -- count as exiting China. Chinese citizens (including Victoria, when we went) need to apply for and receive a visa in advance in order to go to Macao. (A more onerous requirement than is imposed even on US citizens, who can enter for 30 days visa-free, and this is supposed to be part of China.) In other words, it's basically a different country. They have their own currency, the Pitaca (as does Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Dollar). My Chinese cell phone didn't work there. Etc.

But enough about that. What was it like there? Well, I've never been to Las Vegas, but I imagine that a lot of it was pretty much like Las Vegas. It was all casinos and enormous hotels, bright lights and high-end shops and shiny tall buildings, expensive shows and glamour and pageantry and the love of money.

But then co-existing with that is evidence of its (recent) history as a Portuguese colony. There is colonial architecture, and cathedrals, seeing which made me feel like I was right back in Lima. Nearly all the public signage is in both Portuguese as well as Chinese (they use traditional Chinese characters, like Hong Kong and Taiwan, instead of the "simplified" ones used in the People's Republic itself). So that was fun and kind of refreshing, having the Portuguese there. I've progressed a long way in my Chinese, especially with reading, but the Portuguese was still easier to understand, and especially easier to process at a glance since it's written using the Roman alphabet [ABC...] instead of Chinese characters.

So you've got your glitzy-gambly-tourism industry, your European-colonial remnants, and then on top of all that, you've got your overpopulated-kinda-dirty-Chinese-city feel. Apparently it's the most densely populated area in the world? - which after seeing it, I can believe. Everywhere is just stacked with these typical Chinese grimy-exteriored, barred-windowed, dozens-of-stories-high apartment buildings. You might think that some municipal authority would keep those areas more separate from the more touristy locations, but with the exception of the main casino strip we went to, the plain dense living quarters were just ubiquitous, stacked over and behind the colonial-style buildings.

The weather was not so great when we went there, and I didn't take a whole lot of pictures. But I did just successfully upload several to share with you in this post. Unfortunately, due to browser or internet problems, I can't access them now in order to just get the links to post the images here... so I guess that'll just have to wait till next time.

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Note: I wrote this yesterday, 2/14, but due to not having internet at home, I am just posting it now.



We're now in the village of Tiantai, near the city of Hangzhou, in the province of Zhejiang (China). Yesterday we flew from Bangkok (Thailand) to Guangzhou (China) and then from Guangzhou to Hangzhou. (Each about a 2-hour flight, with a 3-hour layover between.) Then we took a bus from Hangzhou to Tiantai, and my friend Molin met us at the bus station, and we took a taxi to her home.

It was New Year's Eve last night, and we shot off fireworks outside the house. It looked as if everyone else in the town was doing the same thing -- there were fireworks going off continuously for hours and hours, in every direction, from before sunset on New Year's Eve until... well, they're still going on now (after dark on New Year's Day). The noise of them has been literally constant the whole time we've been here (and before; on the bus on the way here, looking out the windows e could see fireworks going off all over, shot not from one communal celebration but from thousands of small groups of families and friends). During the day today too, while we were walking around town, people all over were setting off firecrackers in the street and really loud things that sound like gunshots.

Staying with Molin's family has been an extraordinary blessing - and quite a different experience for us. It is very cold here - it must be close to freezing because last night it was sleeting, and even though it was just raining this morning, there was still icy slush lying around outside. But we don't have any heat, so inside is almost exactly the same temperature as outside. We can see our breath inside too.

I've been wearing three shirts plus two heavy jackets, and sweatpants under my pants. As well as gloves, winter hat, and socks and shoes. (Inside as well as outside, the same.) To sleep, I took off my outer layer (one coat and one pair of pants) and the hat and gloves, and covered my whole body with two very thick blankets. You have to put your whole head under or else your face will freeze off; plus, exhaling under the covers helps keep your whole body warm.

There's no hot water either. We used water heated in the kitchen to wash our faces at night, and Molin told me we're going to go to a public facility to shower tomorrow. (At least we don't have to wash in this ice water!) To keep warm we had hot food - we ate hotpot, a Chinese classic, but this was actually the first time I'd had it - and homemade bayberry wine.

When we arrived they were aware we might be unprepared for this cold, and the family gave us gifts of socks and long underwear, and had all these extra coats to lend us. Then out in the city today we bought waterproof, lined boots, because our tennis shoes were getting soaked through. (We bought the two biggest pairs they had, but luckily they did have some that were big enough; we went roller skating today and they didn't have any skates big enough, but we all crammed our feet into the next size down, and made it work.) We also gave the family some gifts that we had picked up in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand.

Their hospitality and generosity have been overwhelming. Not only are we staynig in their house, and the gifts they gave us and everything I mentioned earlier, but mostly there's been the copious quantities of food. It's been impossible to keep up with the amount of (delicious, vegetarian) food that they've been bombarding us with. Molin's mom has been cooking almost non-stop, it seems. And they've been attentive to our needs - when I was having real trouble using the chopsticks because my fingers were numb with cold, she brought me a hot water bottle to hold.

Walking around the town today (which is New Year's Day as well as Valentine's Day) was a nice change of pace from all our time in big cities lately (not thatI don't like that too) -- this town is not exactly rural, but things are definitely more spread out than inside a city, and especially a Chinese city. Families live in separate houses, for one thing, instead of stacked on top of each other in skyscrapers. There are also fields and open spaces, and each family has their own little vegetable garden.

Everyone reading this probably knows how much I hate the cold. Many times that I've been places, the cold or heat has played a big role in determining how well I liked it. Well, this is probably as continuously cold of an environment as I've ever been in, so it's a testament to how good of an experience it's been to be here that even with the cold, I'm very happy here.

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Been on the move since I last posted. We did do our touristy little "trek" (Jason and I, not Nick), and then immediately (like an hour after we got back) took a bus to Bangkok. After one night there, we (Nick and I, not Jason) took a bus (actually a van, then another van, then a taxi, then a tuk-tuk... this whole sticker-on-the-shirt, passing-us-around-to-different-vehicles thing has become old hat already) to Siem Reap, Cambodia. The next day, we visited Angkor Wat and surrounding temples. Angkor Wat (the first syllable with an "ah" sound) is a 12th-Century temple (originally Hindu, now Buddhist) that is one of southeast Asia's primary attractions and a source of national pride for Cambodia (it appears on the flag; image above). We spent two nights in Cambodia, in the city near Angkor Wat, which is called Siem Reap ("SEE-um REE-up") -- which means "Siam Defeated", after some ancient victory over Siam (which we now call Thailand). And then today we took a bus back to Bangkok. The day after tomorrow we fly out of here, to go back to China, to celebrate the Lunar New Year there.

What struck me more than anything about Cambodia was the poverty. I'm not sure why, because on the face of it it wasn't that different from what I'd seen in many of the other places I've been to, but something about the hot, crowded, dusty, dirty, smelly unabatedness of it made it seem worse to me in some way. It was just continual, outside the city and then inside the city - but then we got to the touristy downtown area of Siem Reap and there were all these just incredibly ritzy hotels, as ostentatious as anything I've seen, and the contrast was just stark. Anyway the temples were interesting enough; they were ancient temples, you know. But of course the most interesting thing is just the people, the language, the life there. (The kinds of things we haven't gotten to see a lot of on most of our trip around here, confined as we have been to tourist areas, but which I felt like I got a little more of in Siem Reap for some reason - maybe because it was a smaller city with less of a tourist area (although it was still pretty touristy), maybe for that reason I felt like more of the local population was actually mixed into the crowds, rather than just all tourists and those serving them or begging from them. I don't know, maybe other people wouldn't have the same impression, but it seemed a little better in that regard to me.

I'll try to post pictures later from some of this stuff, and probably include some more description then, but I wanted to at least keep you up to date with our movements.

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We took the bus overnight last night from Vientiane, Laos to Chiang Mai, Thailand (changing buses in Udonthani, Thailand). Once again, it was a pretty sketchy experience. We bought our tickets through a travel agent. They handed us off to a taxi driver who didn't speak English, who put a yellow sticker on each of our shirts, took us to the station and bought tickets for us and said goodbye. Then we noticed that the tickets were really cheap and didn't seem to go all the way to Chiang Mai (as we had paid the travel agent for). Also, when the bus pulled up, it was definitely not of the "VIP" quality that we had ordered. It was more like a regular city bus. So we were suspicious.

(A similar thing happened with our bus from Hanoi, Vietnam to Vientiane: we were handed off from one person to another to another, many of whom didn't speak good or any English, and we were just sort of left wondering what we were supposed to do when - and that time, we didn't even have any tickets until I finally tracked the guy down and emphatically shrugged at him a couple times - I think he paid for the tickets but thought the lady at the counter would give them to us after he disappeared, but she was waiting for him to come back, and we of course had no idea what was going on this whole time because nobody explained anything to us. Anyway we eventually got our tickets and got on the bus, and - after a few more episodes of confusion regarding border procedures and baggage that eventually worked themselves out - we made it to our destination.)

Anyway, we got on the bus in Vientiane, and it turned out Jason and Nick both had seats (again, on this regular-city-bus-looking thing) but I didn't have one. My ticket was for standing room only. (They were all the same price.) So I alternately stood and sat on the floor until we reached Udonthani (the destination of this bus we were on) wondering if we were going to have to buy new tickets from there to Chiang Mai. We had met a Canadian guy and his Thai wife or girlfriend on the bus who were also heading to Chiang Mai (of course, they hadn't bought that ticket yet; their current ticket, like ours, was only to Udonthani) and they said they'd help us out (it was nice that she spoke Thai). But as it turned out, when we got off the bus, there was a guy there scanning the crowd for our yellow stickers - so we got in his car and he took us to the other bus station in town, and got us our new tickets - on a VIP bus - to Chiang Mai. We waited there till the bus came, got on, and no more problems. ("VIP" basically just means more leg room, I think. But that alone is worth the extra 100 baht or whatever the difference was.)

We spent the day here in Chiang Mai. Tomorrow we're going to do a little one-day trek out in the jungle, which, although it might be rather touristy, will be different from what we've done so far. Then tomorrow night we're getting on a bus for Bangkok. We've got to get moving, because our plan now is to skip Phuket and southern Thailand, and instead take a one- or two-day trip into Cambodia to see Angkor Wat, and then head back to Bangkok (because the flights out of there were a lot cheaper) and then fly to China. We bought our plane tickets from Bangkok to Hangzhou today.

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As I mentioned before, I lost a lot of pictures from Vietnam, so I guess we're just going to have to skip some of that stuff for now. Later, I hope to get copies of Nick's pictures and maybe there'll be some stuff in there that I'll want to share with you. For now, let's look at pictures from Laos.

1. Walking across the border from Vietnam to Laos at dawn.



2. Transport on one of these things that's like a motorcycle three-wheeler, except the back is carrying a covered U-shaped bench (sometimes they modify the backs of pick-ups in the same way) arranged almost like one of those army trucks you see in the movies, except this one only holds about 6 or 7 people comfortably (or less)



3. Vientiane was all temples and monks. You couldn't turn around without seeing another temple. Here's a young monk-in-training (or something; the older fellows didn't seem to have those yellow sashes) walking down the street.



4. In Vientiane they have an Arc de Triomphe (the English on the plaque there called it a "Victory Gate" -- which pretty much sounds like "Arc de Triomphe" to me) which is like the one in Paris except maybe smaller (I don't know how big the one in Paris is), and except that the interior of the cupola on the one here is decorated with pictures of elephants and Eastern religious iconography. (Sorry I can't be any more specific than that; I would guess Buddhism since that what seems to abound here, but I'm not sure.)



5. Getting started young with the family business



6. A lot of the signage was in both Lao and French, a testament to their colonial history (...to say nothing of the Victory Gate). Also, a lot of the words in Lao are impossibly long.



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I've been trying to upload pictures for you guys but I keep running into problems....

Late Update: I also seem to have lost about 70% of my pictures from Vietnam due to data file issues for some reason. Which is disappointing.</b>