Hard to believe it’s been five months in Asia, but I feel right at home again. I’m 22 now. That was the fastest year ever.

I had some long-anticipated Taco Bell (duh) and drove the car around town. The streets are so wide! And… not congested! At least until I get back to Los Angeles, of course. But it feel great.

I love and miss Hong Kong. And yet… I don’t think I’d live or work there. The wages, while good for Asia, are generally low when adjusted for the US. The housing situation is pretty rough too. And though the people there are great, they’re just on an entirely different plane when it comes to their values and thought processes. It’s a cultural barrier I don’t think I’d ever fully adapt to.

But who knows? Right now I want to get a solid grasp of the Mandarin language. I don’t think I’d ever really come close to understanding Chinese culture until I got at least that far. Maybe then I’d do a better job of explaining cultural differences and stuff to you all, but for now I’m just too much of a foreigner.

Anyways, that’s enough chatter. Thanks for reading. I might continue writing about other travels in the future, but not here. The blog was for CUHK Spring 2007, so I think I’ll leave it at that.

Bye!

The exciting point of the week was, believe it or not, my little cousin’s elementary school graduation party. The elementary/middle school threw a concert where a bunch of Taiwanese pop artists performed, including…

Jay Chou!!! Singing and messing around with a basketball. The story according to the papers is that six years ago, Jay promised that he’d sing at his agent’s kid’s graduation, who happens to be in the same class as my cousin. What a good way to keep a promise, even after all his wild success. Lucky kids.

Other than that…

Eating Din Tai Fung!

And spicy beef noodles, the ultimate comfort food.

And good old late night shaved ice.

Ok so I realize this wasn’t really a post but I gotta run, I’ll see you on the other side!

People-watching the fashionable youth of Shibuya, one of Tokyo’s shopping districts. Sunglasses. Night. Weird!

Visiting lovely historical sites like Kiyomizu Temple and the Imperial Palace in Kyoto.

Keeping our eyes open for the ever-elusive geisha in Gion.

Eating meals like this…

And desserts like this…

Playing with costumes. Fear my samurai peacock helmet!

And staying in tatami rooms at hot springs resorts.

Japanese things always seem to be a little cute, weird, or both…

But I guess it’s just a crazy place.

I’m in Taiwan now. Jeff out.

I did have to answer about fifty useless questions at immigration, and got my bags inspected on the MTR (which by the way is exactly like Hong Kong’s, complete with a multilingual “please mind the platform gap”), and I think I would get really irritated if I had to deal with it every day. I also thought the sunglasses-wearing soldiers with machine guns at the airport were just silly. I mean really, what do you need a machine gun for at an airport? Not that I tried to take a picture of them or anything.

Singapore feels very similar to Hong Kong, except it’s about twice as hot and three times as humid. Here’s something about the language there: many people there speak Mandarin or Cantonese as a first language, but the level of English education is so good that it seems like everyone just speaks to each other in English. So it was pretty different seeing a group of people who were clearly Chinese locals all speaking in English in a group so everyone could understand. They even spoke English to the flight attendant on my flight home, who probably understands all the languages anyways. Interesting.

Shopping and eating appear be the favorite activities here, as it is in HK, although things are expensive. It was the first time I’ve ever been to a McDonald’s that was more expensive than back in the States. Nearly gave into the temptation of Double Filet-O-Fish.

Luckily there’s always street food, which is a pretty interesting blend of HK, Taiwanese, and Malaysian dishes along with a few local specialties like stingray. We only ate there twice but our whole street smelled delicious. I think if I came back it would be mainly out of curiosity for the food, and then I could have some stingray.

Oh and the bakeries here are amazing. Among some of the best bread I’ve had in Asia, including one huge “Hidden Tiger, Crouching Bacon.” Eaten.

We walked a bit at night to see some of the buildings, but we didn’t see much. It was still pleasant.

I like staying at hostels, but mostly reputable, safe ones. I didn’t really like the one we stayed in at Singapore. There were no locks and no keys, meaning people could and did walk through our rooms at any time, especially because they had to pass my room to get to some of their own. And then I met this old guy who stays in the room next to me that I talked to for a while and turned out to be really creepy, and I’m not one to get creeped out easily by old guys. It occurred to me that I would be really mad if I made it this far only to die in Singapore, the safest place in Asia. But I didn’t die. I have returned.
Here’s Singapore. Looks just like HK but cleaner and more organized, no?

Only one more day left in Hong Kong…

Cameron Highlands was a refreshing change to the tough weather of Malaysia; it was cool and dry. As a hill resort, people usually come to see tea plantations, strawberry farms, cactus and flower gardens, and butterfly farms. It actually sounds really lame but I liked it a lot.

We caught a bus in the morning to a some small road and walked a few miles to get to a tea plantation. You would think that a tea plantation is this little place with some tea plants but it’s not. The hills all around us were covered with tea plants before we got anywhere near the visitor’s center. The factory, where they still use equipment from the 30s, smelled delicious; it smelled more like fruit than tea. Being there really made me want to buy some tea, especially with deliciously tempting flavors like Lychee Rose and Lime & Ginger.

The other thing that Cameron Highlands is popular for are its strawberry products. They sell strawberry stuff everywhere and it’s all straight from the farm: strawberry ice cream, strawberries with cream, jam with crackers, dried honeyed strawberries, strawberry tarts, pudding, etc. I even had strawberry roti from the Indian restaurant that we ate at for all our meals. Really good stuff if you love strawberries like me, so it was a good day.

We took a long hike back into town in our flip flops and stopped by a few other places, like cactus and flower gardens. When we realized it was too far to walk, we got picked up by a taxi for 1 ringgit each, which was less than what the bus would have cost. So that was almost weirdly cheap but it got us into town where we had some nice strawberry and banana lassi to cool off our day.

That night we caught a bus back to Kuala Lumpur and stayed there for the night.

Not a whole lot happened that day actually; we walked all over town and saw some really nice architecture and the world’s tallest flagpole which we learned about in a video we watched for our Asian Business class! It’s not supposed to be a very good thing because the video was about how a lot of Asian countries wasted money when they could have been helping their people, but nevertheless it was fun to see. We went to an indoor market that I actually found interesting. Kind of overdid it with the tribal / jungle appeal though, and overpriced too, so we left.

KL has a definite feel to it which kind of comes out at night. It looks almost like Vegas without the casinos: big flashy buildings on a long road with palm trees. They had the biggest golden”M” I’ve ever seen so I decided it was time for Spicy Beef Foldover.

Okay I have to talk about this thing for a minute because it was so good. It was big and surprisingly spicy, more spicy than you’d expect from McDonald’s. Tasted like Taco Bell smothered with Fire Sauce. And it was packed with vegetables of a higher caliber than I’m used to here, like red onions and carrots and stuff. Damn it was good. Maybe the best McDonald’s I’ve ever had.

It doesn’t look like much but trust me it was good.

Now the Malaysians in Borneo are probably the chillest people I’ve ever met, and they don’t annoy foreigners at all, probably because tourism isn’t as huge there. Not so in Kuala Lumpur though. The bus station in particular felt almost like Shenzhen, with people jumping in your face and tugging your arm to try to get your business. I didn’t like it, but we had to get bus tickets.

That night we went to some club. Again all the clubs here happen to be jungle themed. It was all right, but nothing special. Too hot.

Mulu is famous for its caves, so we hiked to a few that day. Henry, our tour guide, pointed out some cool things about the jungle like this plant that had ants inside that would rattle madly if someone poked the plant, and then pour out to attack whoever was disturbing them. Symbiosis again! One thing that was pretty amazing about the jungle was how loud it was all the time. There was a constant roar of birds and insects and whatever else all around you. We saw some pretty butterflies drinking water off the floor after it stopped raining.

It definitely rained every day we were in Malaysia, but most definitely in Mulu. We walked in and out of the rain and finally got to the caves, which were huge and eerie. You could hear bats above you and smell their lovely guano but we couldn’t see any of them in the darkness. At it’s opposite end was a place called the Garden of Eden, where there was soft light and beautiful trees and rainwater flowing off the mouth of the cave. It was unreal, and they told us people used to be able to get to it, but not anymore because the path to it is blocked. Kind of sucked but I think there’s an old story about that…

The other cave had a crazy set of stalagmites and stalactites, which I learned about when I was probably 7 but it was cool seeing them in person. Afterwards we waited outside the entrance to the caves for the bats to come out to feed, but they didn’t come because it was too rainy. Bummer!

We walked back in the pouring night and saw some crazy-looking jungle bugs. Frogs here go woot woot woot and sound like birds.

There was more cave-walking the next day. On our way to a few caves we passed through one pitch-black cave where I took a picture of a bat, although you can’t really tell it’s a bat. But it’s a bat. We reached one cave with a giant river flowing through it and another with more huge stalactites.

There was also a lot of sleeping because it was so hot and wet, although maybe not as hot as Thailand. Mulu has the kind of humidity that would have me soaking wet after a 5 minute walk at night, and I’m the least sweaty guy I know. The food there was terrible too, there was really only one cafe and it was overpriced. Street food had spoiled us.

In the morning we went on a long canopy walk that takes you to the top of the trees on a wobbly plank bridge. We didn’t see any monkeys but it was a pretty fun walk.

We head out!

The geography of Malaysia is kind of confusing, but here goes. Malaysia itself is divided into Peninsular Malaysia, which is south of Thailand, and Borneo Malaysia, which is on the island of Borneo. Borneo Malaysia is made up of two Malaysian states, Sarawak and Sabah. Kota Kinabalu, or KK as it’s commonly called, is the capital of Sabah. Here’s a map.

We were picked up at KK Airport on Friday and dropped off at our backpacker’s hostel, where we stayed in a comfy fan-cooled dorm room. We met a couple of Swedish students who are on a one-year social anthropology program from their university. It basically means they travel the world to anywhere where there’s indigenous people and study them for a few months at a time, but all they did while we were there was go to the beach. Sounds like fun, yes?

That night we went to town to eat Indian food. I checked out the McDonald’s local menu, where they have a Spicy Beef Foldover which looks like a deliciously giant beef pita.

The upstairs area of the hostel where our rooms are has a big open window, so during the night we saw a good number of lizards or geckos hanging out on the ceiling. While I was showering in the shared bathroom a gecko ran across the wall and spooked me. But then I thought it was a cute little gecko, like the one from the Geico commercials.

In the morning we ate at this Indian place nearby that the Swedes recommended us. It’s open 24 hours and has egg roti and fresh juice for about 2 ringgits, or 60 US cents each. It would become our default food stop for the weekend.

There was a neighborhood near our hostel that we think might have been project housing. The houses were really short and crowded and there weren’t very good roads. There were a lot of kids playing outside and older people hanging out by the creek. As we walked the kids ran up to see us, some of them speaking to us in broken English or what they guessed might have been our native language. Most of them weren’t shy at all and started doing crazy poses for our cameras and then gathering to look at themselves in the pictures. They kept following us around shouting “one more, one more!” and asking for money. It was fun and a little weird, but they were cool kids.

That afternoon we went into the city center and looked around a mall. The place wasn’t anything special except I did get a waffle with chocolate and kaya (coconut jam) for 60 cents and it was insane.

We walked along the waterfront where there are a lot of nicer restaurants and enjoyed the sunset over the South China Sea. At the main city market there was a huge section for fruit, vegetables and fish, and another that was a barbecue fish and chicken kebabs section, and then another for desserts like fried bananas. We got some kebabs, fried rice and a fantastic bowl of soup, followed by shaved ice, which by the way is the best dessert ever in the heat of Southeast Asia. Fireworks came on, nobody was really sure what for, and most of the people working there stopped for a bit to watch.

We picked up a bunch of tropical fruit and had a fruit party back at the hostel.

After some Indian food in the morning we took a boat from the city to a park on an island nearby. There were a bunch of monitor lizards all over the place and I tried chasing some for a picture but they were shy. We rented snorkels and swam for a bit over some coral reef. There wasn’t a whole lot of reef but I did see some fancy blue fish and a little fish eating things off of the blue fish’s body. I’m a big fan of symbiosis.

We took a walk on an island trail and it started to rain. They told us there were snakes and lizards and pheasants we could see but we didn’t see anything. It just rained a lot and we got to a clearing where there were two very unusual trees growing out of the rocky shore. We walked back in the rain and went back to the market for more food.

I had this great thing where they deep fry a bunch of dough, then put vegetables and egg in the middle, then fold the fried dough over itself like a fried pocket which was chopped into chunks and served with hot sauce. It was so good, and the sunset was beautiful again.

We went back to the same stand as last night and asked for more of their soup. They thought we were weird for wanting just soup and no food. Then somehow we ended up taking pictures in the rain with the ladies who worked there and the guy who cooked our food and some random people who wanted to take pictures with us too. Malaysian people are cool.

I’m done with classes forever, as far as I can tell. I guess I feel good about it but these things take time to sink in for me.

There was a farewell party last Friday; it was nice. Tonight all of us just got together and ordered pizzas and hung out for the last night we’d all be together in Hong Kong. I’ve had a great time with these guys, but all good things come to an end and that’s life.

So, goodbye. You’re an amazing bunch.

I’m not quite done with Asia yet, though. I’ll be back May 8, and will update you then.

I don’t think CUHK properly prepared us for this trip. We signed up for a program to teach high school students English, so they put us on a bus and off we went. We arrived at around night time and some guy met us at the bus stop who was like “Hey you guys are from Chinese U right? Right this way to my sketchy looking van with the tinted windows…” Anyways we didn’t die and that’s what matters.

Shantou is a pretty developed city, and we noticed some gorgeous apartment complexes there. The school, however, was outside of town and very poor. When we arrived they made us a really nice, big Chinese dinner. We were fed very well that weekend.

We lived in special rooms in the student dorm area. Nothing too shabby, but the windows wouldn’t close so the mosquitos really had their way with us at night.

Saturday was teaching day. The school has a special program that some kids are in, and it’s kind of like an English major but in high school. The students (mostly girls) were divided into two groups. Group 2 had more developed English skills and we taught them in the morning first. Some of them were quite interested in us and some couldn’t be bothered. I didn’t blame them; it was Saturday. We showed them photos and videos, which they liked, and played some games which were rather hit or miss. Except Telephone, everyone loves Telephone!

During the break I joined a few students for a game like hacky-sack, except it was with a birdie-like thing with feathers.

Group 1 was less responsive, as we expected, and it was after lunch so everyone kind of stopped caring. It wasn’t so bad, and I had some interesting conversations with a few of them. Most of them like to play video games and shop in the city and read. We gave them some magazines from the US but I think they just looked at the pictures. They asked us if we had girlfriends or boyfriends. They also asked us to show them how to dance, which I really hoped Stephanie would but she wimped out. They got bored so I taught them how to play Spoons and I think they had a lot of fun.

So I guess we expected them to be more curious about us and the States, but maybe that was just us being American and thinking everyone cares about us when they really don’t. After all most of them haven’t been outside of Shantou and just wanted to do their thing and hang out with friends. It’s cool that they’re learning English though. By the end of the day they kept calling us “teacher” and wanted to take pictures with us, especially Steve. They liked him.

That evening we were sitting around and a girl working at the school offered us some gong fu cha, which literally translated is Kung Fu tea. It’s a very concentrated tea that is taken from tiny cups. She kept pouring, and we couldn’t say no, and it eventually killed my sleep.

That night I covered myself with the sheets as well as I could, except my hands were really hot and itchy from the bites the night before. So I eventually gave up and stuck my arms out, again at the mercy of the damn bugs. On the way back home the next day I counted 17 bites on my hands and arms. Still, a small price to pay for a fascinating experience.