Liz and I made it safely to Shanghai! Woohoo! We managed to make it through our first day without falling asleep TOO early (got a few hours sleep on the plane). I have to say, it’s a bit of a culture shock being here in China… Even just simple things, like ordering dinner, are done completely differently! And a *few* people speak english, but not very many, which makes for fun adventures in pantomiming. Shanghai seems very much like a tourist destination for Chinese people, as opposed to we white folk, but we’re enjoying ourselves nonetheless. One thing that is absolutely *maddening* is all the honking. My god! I think people honk their horns just to say “I am driving!” Every 2 or three seconds, somebody will honk their horn. It really doesn’t seem to follow any discernable pattern. Which sort of defeats the purpose, in my opinion, but whatever. The subway seems pretty good, if crowded, but “crowded” pretty much seems to define the whole city. There’s just people and cars and bikes and mopeds and motorcycles EVERYWHERE. We’re having a blast though! Can’t wait to get some of the pictures up - once I’m somewhere that I can actually upload them, I’ll definitely have them up! More updates soon!
Ok, so I had somehow managed to avoid Battlestar Galactica for the first 3 seasons that it has been on the air, despite the ravings of rabid nerdsfans all across the internets. Then, at some point over the last year I figured “Hey, I might as well download it, to give me something to watch should I ever get bored.” - well, I downloaded the first 3 seasons, and then forgot about them. It wasn’t until Liz went off on a hen weekend (hen == bachelorette, stagette, etc for my North American readers) a few weeks ago, and I found myself without any new Family Guy, Simpsons, American Dad, Numb3rs, or My Name Is Earl episodes that I decided to pop it in. And what a mistake that was! Over the course of that weekend, I blasted through the original (new) mini-series, and the first 8 or 9 episodes of season one. I was officially hooked! My inner geek (who had been a bit deprived since Serenity, frankly) was unleashed, and I was off to the races. I’m now up to episode… 12? 13? of season 2, and it’s still amazing. The ONLY complaint I have about the show, is one that I’m sure has been stated many a time already by geeks across the blogotron already - how the hell does networking your computers together suddenly make them so vulnerable to Cylon virus attacks? That’s the onlything that really bugs me about the show. Everything else is pure, unadulterated awesomeness.
Ok. I mentioned that Liz and I were going on a bit of a whirlwind trip on our way back to Canada, promising more details later. Well, it’s now later. It’s true, we’re doing 6 weeks of travelling through Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand rather than going directly back to Canada. Here’s the list of our destinations:
- Shanghai
- Siem Reap/Angkor Wat
- Phnom Penh (ok, technically we arrive from Shanghai in Phnom Penh - but then we hop on a bus to Siem Reap so I’m considering this to be a destination AFTER Siem Reap
- Krabi/Ko Phi Phi/Phuket
- Singapore
- Melbourne (to see Joe and Talie! Yay!)
- Sydney
- Townsville, driving up to Cairns
- Queenstown
- Wellington
- Los Angeles (for 8 hours)
It’s really going to be the trip of a lifetime! It’s required a hell of a lot of planning, I’m not gonna lie! First off, we got a round the world plane ticket - specifically, a Great Escapade. This covered all of our flights except for Phnom Penh->Siem Reap, internal Australian flights and from LA->Toronto (apparently Canada isn’t included in the Great Escapade). We booked some internal flights for the rest of our stuff… except for half of the route from Phnom Penh->Siem Reap, for which we’ve elected to take the bus (I’ve heard it can be rough, but I’m excited for a bit of rugged Cambodian countryside in an otherwise hotel/plane based trip). We’ve spent a hell of a lot of time on TripAdvisor looking up hotels and such too. I absolutely can’t wait! And don’t worry - I’ll be taking PLENTY of pictures, and hopefully posting some along the way along with trip updates for each place. It depends on what sort of downtime/internet time we have. And we leave a week from today! AAAAAAH!
Rest in peace, you crazy, hilarious man.
So, this is the latest innovation from Google - Gmail Paper! For all those people that aren’t happy with their email being stored only digitally, now you can get it stored in paper format! Excellent! I love how they offset the cost of shipping.
Of course, a quick check of the date will explain how Google came up with this brilliant idea.
