davethegrinch.net

Sarah says:

 My mind was running wild imagining what Chinese Immigration would be like.  David and I both admitted that going through any immigration makes us  a little nauseous.  Even Dutch immigration never failed to make me sweat a wee bit even though their toughest question ever was aflirtatious , “Do you speak Dutch?”  There was the time, I don’t think I ever documented this, during all my back and forth between Amsterdam and London that Heathrow immigration almost didn’t let me into the country and I have a ‘coded’ stamp in my passport as a souvenir.  This means that from April of this year for the next six months they will view any of my attempts to enter England as mildly suspicious on account of them thinking I’m actually illegally living there.

 But this is a whole different ball game, right?  This isn’t the Lovey English or milk-drinking Dutch - this is CHINA!  Now tell me who in their right mind would be relaxed about entering China for the first time? Fortunately, the only other westerner on our ferry, a girl from Germany traveling alone, had made friends with a Chinese girl and they were in line in front of us.  Every calming word the Chinese girl said to the German girl David and I overheard and it was calming us, too.  We also knew that the Chinese girl was studying in Seoul and she was coming home to visit her parents who were just on the other side of immigration waiting for her.  Her pure excitement put me at ease as well.  What bad could possibly happen trying to cross a border that this adorable little thing was so clearly excited to cross?

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Dave Says:

I love disaster movies and especially ones where ocean liners are concerned. I’m writing this entry not from an ocean liner but from a very large international ferry currently in somewhat minor melodrama, adrift in the Yellow Sea between Korea and China. The ’slow boat to China’ is certainly turning out to be slower than anticipated which has given me the opportunity look about the ship and its passengers with a Poseidon Adventure/Titanic type eye.

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Sarah says:

We have been taken under the wing of the entire country of Korea. It’s not just the Love Motels that have kept ‘On the Wings of Love’ painfully stuck in my head for the past three weeks. Now, I know that everyone always says about the places they travel to, ‘Oh, the people were so nice.’  Heck, tourists have even been known to say that about New Yorkers, maybe to the chagrin of the New Yorkers? Or is that just me buying into the NY image myself.  In any case, Koreans take the cake, or more appropriately, the kimchi.

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Dave Says:

Love Shack baby! Every country provides challenges when it comes to finding suitable accommodation. In Korea the challenge is which motel will have the best porn.

Normally, the humble backpacker’s hostel provides warmth and shelter for our weary bones but for some reason Korea has this strange glut of affordable accommodation in the form of the ubiquitous Love Motel. I’m not entirely sure where these originated and why, but I’ve never seen so much red flashing neon in my entire life and please bear in mind I spent seven months of that life living a quick walk from Amsterdam’s Red Light District.

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Dave says:

I must say, this is quite the civilized country. I don’t mean that in a demeaning way, a suggestion that perhaps the Koreans are still bashing people over the head with large tree branches, I mean it in a ‘civilized compared to the Asia we’ve come to know and love so far’ way. There’s none of that frontier town feeling that Vietnam or Cambodia exhibit or any of the well oiled tourist veneer that blights Thailand or the underlying oppression that is obvious in Malaysia. No, South Korea is a wealthy, balanced, um - dare I say ‘nice’ place to be. It’s almost that perfect balance between Asia and the West. A crossroads of the known and the unknown, and to boot, we appear to be the only westerners here.

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Dave Says:

We write a blog entry about food and drink for every country we visit. Why this is we don’t know, we are not gluttons, it just happened that way. Here comes the report for Taiwan: If you can kill it, you can fry it and if you can fry it, you can eat it. This may sound a little unfair and had I written this entry before we left the country it may have sounded a little different. Sure, the egg burrito things (gently fried) were nice and the dumplings (gently fried or abrasively steamed) were good too. However, nothing we ate in Taiwan appeared to be much better than cultural fast food. Their hotpot concept is quite good though - an all you can eat buffet of fresh veggies, meat and seafood that you cook yourself in a pot of broth at your table. However, much like poor Chang’s Mongolian Grill on Broadway, the excitement of creating your own custom soup wears thin once you realize that it all ends up tasting the same no matter how custom you make it.

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Sarah says:

To wake up in the morning in Amsterdam and go to bed that night in Taiwan is a crazy thing. Firstly, it takes 19 hours of travel to be able to accomplish such a feat of contrasting sleeping environments. But aside from flying time (small digression, we did so via Singapore Airlines and true to reputation, it was a very nice airline indeed and the food is really good…), it struck me as rather mind-boggling that Amsterdam and Taipei can co-exist simultaneously on the same planet. Over in Amsterdam people are living very Dutch lives and in Taipei people are living very Taiwanese lives and this is all happening at the same time, every single day and the Dutch aren’t thinking about the Taiwanese and the Taiwanese aren’t thinking about the Dutch. After all our traveling, David and I have started to view the world as being rather small but in this one moment, I felt the hugeness of the world and I truly did feel like I was on the other side of it.

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