June 16th, 2008 by DaveTheGrinch
Dave says:
The Asians have a particular way of going about their bus business and it isn’t the way we go about ours. Riding the bus anywhere in Asia appears at first to be a step back in time; the lack of humanity and civility being almost too much to bare. Then, after enough bum-numbing, vomit inducing, deafening and death defying miles you can’t help but wonder at the total humanity of it all. It’s a humanity that is lacking in the west. We are cut of from our fellow humans by our iPods and desire to just get to where we’re going without interacting with or catching a cold from the guy sitting next to us. Take away the iPod and make the common cold the least of the ailments you have to worry about and the bus becomes the connection between you and your world with a chance to chat to your neighbours in the process.
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June 16th, 2008 by DaveTheGrinch
Dave Says:
If you truly want to travel, use your nose. Not as a direction finding instrument but as the sense that informs your desirous brain that you’ve arrived. Arrived at what is unclear until you get there and that all depends on what you’re looking for to begin with. In the case of China, I know we’ve arrived at the more challenging aspects of travelling because everything smells vaguely of pee. When life smells like that you know you’re in the real world and not on vacation. Sometimes it smells very much of pee, or in the case of the small child who took a dump right next me on the floor of the train carriage we were in, it smells distinctly of poop. Read the rest of this entry »
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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May 29th, 2008 by DaveTheGrinch
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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May 15th, 2008 by DaveTheGrinch
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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May 14th, 2008 by DaveTheGrinch
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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