Winter break adventures – Pictures soon!

For our three-ish-week-long Winter break, Thomas and I went to Hong Kong, Macau and Thailand. Seeing Hong Kong first was kind of nice, as it’s kind of like an anglicized version of China with more diverse food options and the creamiest, dreamiest milk tea imaginable.

The weather was surprisingly tropical, hovering around the mid-70s most of the time. We went to Victoria Peak by tram, which was terrifying. At one point we were almost completely vertical, sitting on tiny wooden benches. I thought I was going to topple over backwards and fall out the back window – luckily that didn’t happen.

We also saw pink flamingos, which was awesome!

Macau was going to be our “trip to Vegas” without the Vegas. Imagine a Florida with big shiny buildings that’s pretty much void of people during the day, and with flashing lights and smoking Chinese gamblers at night. Thomas got addicted to a game called Sic Bo, which is kind of like Yahtzee.

We ended up winning enough to pay for our cab ride to and from the Venetian, which is the largest casino in the world. It has a fake Venice inside with fake apartment buildings built into the walls and clouds painted on the ceiling, and a canal flowing down the middle of the floor.

Lastly, Thailand took the biggest chunk of our Chinese New Year break. We flew from Hong Kong into Bangkok and pretty much immediately hit a wall of tourists. The lines at immigration were horrendous, and we took some advice from a fellow teacher and stayed on Khao San Road, which we were told was a cheap area for backpackers to stay and had good food. What we were not told was that every tourist coming to Thailand already knew this, as did every Thai person who had the intention of selling something to or scamming a tourist, save those people who hung around outside the Grand Palace.

Yes, we did get scammed. But only once! The guy was really nice, and luckily we both still have our wallets and passports, but we’re each 800 baht poorer (25 USD) for taking a crappy boat ride down the dirty side of the Chao Phraya River. Live and learn.

We pretty much blew out of Bangkok as soon as we could and went south to the famous islands for some much-needed relaxation. This is where it gets good:

• We took a taxi to the train station in Bangkok.
• We took a 12-hour overnight train to Surat Thani.
• We took a 2-hour bus from Surat Thani to Krabi.
• We took a pickup truck from Krabi to what we thought was going to be a ferry to Koh Lanta, but was just another port where another van could pick us up to take us to the actual ferry.
• We took a van onto two ferries through Koh Lanta with our driver stopping every 50 feet to deliver packages to locals.
• We were dumped off within 2 km of our final destination where we were meeting friends, so we took a tuk-tuk, which is like a tricked-out motorbike with a big people-wagon attached to it, to the bottom of the island.

That, folks, is how you travel around Thailand. All of this was arranged through an admittedly effective, yet, at first glance, super sketchy travel agency, and all for the low low price of 1,300 baht, which is like 40 USD. Despite being in transit for literally 24 hours, it was a tolerable experience, but it was a little touch-and-go in the van near the end.

Koh Lanta had mountains, cliffs, trees, monkeys and obscenely loud birds. The waters are bluer, the sands whiter, the food cheaper, the beer lighter, the sun more oppressive.

At one point, we realized how little we were spending in Thailand overall, and how many people knew and took advantage of this fact. People sell drinks and snacks out of their homes on the side of the road, their small bedroom hidden at the back of a cozy grocery store. The experience was pretty surreal, as this is probably the poorest place I’ve ever been in the world, and it’s really not that poor.

We went from Koh Lanta to Koh Jum by boat and stayed in wooden bungalows with squat toilets and mosquito nets. We rode precarious motorbikes around the island on treacherous roads; we spent our days reading, and our nights eating and drinking.

How can you see all this, you ask? We have hundreds of photos to upload to Flickr, and will do so soon I hope. But back in China we are coming up on our third week of the second semester, and I’ve started a new schedule that will hopefully be much more tolerable. I’m mostly working with 4th graders, but still teaching geography.

All in all, we are rejuvenated enough from our trips that we have a more positive perspective on our lives here in Shanghai. Even the weather is slowly looking up!