Nepal

Due to the strange time zone we’re in, the sun rises extremely early at 5ish, but also sets around 4pm. This sort of explains why people wake early and also sleep rather early. Waking up, Jiajia felt better after a 15hr nap, so we attempted to grab some food at a local cafe. After Jiajia ate a half piece of toast, we started walking around the area of Thamel where most tourists are located. Running some random errands, we got a pay as you go prepaid SIM card for a staggering 50Rs, which was about $0.60USD!!! The more we travel, the more we realize how ridiculously priced North American mobile fees are! Another cool part, is that there is a lot of good stuff on television. They have movie channels showing decent movies around the clock (good for burning time in the hotel), and at night Discovery and Animal Planet shows make a perfect companion to falling asleep…

Jiajia was still unable to eat, so we wanted to get some fruits. In Thamel, the fruit-stand to North Face shop ratio is about 1:22, so after a 20min walk I managed to hunt down a fruit stand… WTF people don’t eat fruits? The bananas helped the upset stomach, so later in the afternoon, we finally headed out to see what Kathmandu was all about. Continue reading →

As I was desperately trying to update my backdated the blog late into the night, I barely got a couple hours sleep when waking up at 6am. Problem was, Jiajia got 0 hours of sleep as she was suffering from a bout of food poisoning, which I was just recovering from but hers seemed to deteriorate….more on this later.

Catching a flight in the new Kunming International Airport which opened June of this year, it was a pretty cool sight as you drove up towards the simple lines of the massive building (which, I just discovered, is designed by a rather famous firm whose also doing 1 WTC…$). Again, as with most 2^nd/3^rd tier Chinese cities, there’s some ridiculously optimistic infrastructure investment that looks nice and modern, but when you’re inside the building looks severely underused with barely anybody…. Continue reading →