One Night in Guangzhou

With plane ticket prices jacked up during Christmas period but still wanting to travel, we decided, “Why not try the new High Speed Railway in Hong Kong?” and go somewhere in China, like Guangzhou?  So two days before our trip, we decided to book our hotels and train tickets, leaving on a Thursday, and coming back to Hong Kong the following night.  So yeah, one night in Guangzhou.

One look at the people from Guangzhou and you can see the huge resemblance, in fact I would say just a mirror copy, of people from Hong Kong.  Compared with other Asians such as Japanese, Taiwanese, Koreans, even other provinces from China, you could still see some sort of difference between them and Hong Kong people.  But with Guangzhou, you could literally swap these two populations and they wouldn’t differ in terms of their physical appearances.

In fact, I could quickly imagine how Hong Kong would have been if it wasn’t occupied by the British but instead was governed by China all this time… it may have been very identical to the city of Guangzhou. Continue reading One Night in Guangzhou

Haikou is a No Go

Of all the countries I’ve been, China somehow continues to disappoint again and again (exception of Chengdu).  This was how I felt in Lijiang and Shangri-La, and especially this time in Haikou.

Coined “China’s Hawaii”, Haikou has semi resemblances with the beautiful island of US, except we don’t use the word beautiful in this case.  Haikou does have beaches and sunny weather that reminds you of other islands or beachy places like Kenting, except it’s so polluted and quite dirty and rather boring.  Haikou is definitely one of those cities where going once is enough, in fact more than enough. Continue reading Haikou is a No Go

Living In The Du

Chengdu was everything I expected it to be, and at the same time everything I didn’t expect it to be.

Chengdu, an up and coming Chinese city, was in most areas similar to that of Shenzhen, appearance wise.  Old buildings, dirt, pollution… you could tell Chengdu was a Chinese city.  If anything, Chengdu was a bit scarier than Shenzhen as you can see that many buildings weren’t occupied and there were buildings that were still under construction with no clear indication that these buildings would be completed. Continue reading Living In The Du

A Weekend In Shanghai

Yup you read that right; my friend and I spent a weekend in Shanghai back in Sept. 2011 when I just started having a full time job.  In need of a break, we decided to spend a weekend in Shanghai to destress, be young, and have fun.

Since this is a post that’s done more than 4 years after my trip, the exact stuff I’ve done is a bit hazy.  Instead, I’ll put up pictures and a bit of description of what these pictures represent.

Maybe it’s just me, but I found the Shanghainese people to be direct and aggressive sometimes, at least for the people I met.  Not all of them, maybe a few, some of them were really nice to us of course.

Anyway I am not sure how well their English was since we were speaking mainly Mandarin with them, so of course I suggest going there with someone that speaks Mandarin as well! Continue reading A Weekend In Shanghai

Yunnan, Where The Pictures Are Prettier Than Reality Part Two

Thank you for continuing to read part two of my Yunnan trip.  If you haven’t done so already, you can read part one of my Yunnan trip by clicking here: Part One.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I thought Yunnan was overrated.  I found a couple of locals who were very rude and impolite to us (while those who were extremely friendly and nice towards us were our hotel hosts, tour guides, and restaurants we visited).  Shopkeepers were extremely aggressive with their selling (and I understand that their income may be low, but that doesn’t make me not dislike their aggressiveness), and the bathrooms there were very, very unhygienic.  Even the food wasn’t as tasty as we thought, and sometimes the food wasn’t even cooked (we had dumplings where the meat was still pink >o<).  This is really disappointing as it made us lose trust in FOOD… we immediately lost appetite after this incident. Continue reading Yunnan, Where The Pictures Are Prettier Than Reality Part Two

Yunnan, Where The Pictures Are Prettier Than Reality Part One

I hate to say this, but I found Yunnan to be one of the more overrated travel destinations I’ve been to (another one being Venice, Italy).  I was incredibly looking forward for this trip as I heard many good things about the scenery and I have a passion for spicy food, but Yunnan did not live up to its expectations.  I must make a disclaimer though that the time spent for this trip was relatively short, and I would suggest at least a week to visit all the scenery provinces in Yunnan.  Instead, we ended up spending 5 days (4 days of sightseeing, the last day was just getting to the airport) at Lijiang and Shangri-La. Continue reading Yunnan, Where The Pictures Are Prettier Than Reality Part One

KTV For The Ladies

In a world of innocence, KTV simply means an establishment where you can sing karaoke. In our real world, the term KTV can mean more than that, especially for guys. To briefly put, a guy’s version of KTV is an establishment where you can sing karaoke, but with female “accompaniment” that you can choose.

But for this post, I’m actually not going to focus on guy’s version of KTV, I’m going to talk about the much lesser known girl’s version of KTV. Fortunately enough, I managed to get Geo (not real name), an ex-employee of a KTV establishment, to do an interview with me on this topic. Continue reading KTV For The Ladies