Singapore, Lion City
Intro to Singapore After using every last day of our 30-day Indonesia visa, we moved on to Singapore. To make the most of SE Asia’s most modern and expensive city we cashed in our Marriott Rewards point stockpile to check in for five days at the landmark Singapore Marriott, located smack in the middle of […]
Wat’s Your Pleasure?
Bangkok was a surprise. Maybe it has do do with the neighborhood we stayed in, or the activities we chose, but we didn’t find the chaos or danger we’d heard so much about. Yes, the tuk tuks whiz up and down, weaving precariously through heavy traffic. Yes there are scams to watch out for. Unscrupulous […]
Back to School
Language is an occasional barrier to getting the best eats in China, but we refuse to be deterred. We’ve developed some good strategies, and have been greatly enjoying the results. Last month in Pingyao we met a couple who told us about a cooking class they’d taken when they visited Yangshou. A guaranteed meal, and […]
No Spitting Allowed
Twenty-four years after visiting Hong Kong with my family, I wondered how things may have changed. I was a teenager then, and had been living in Japan as an exchange student. My family had come for a visit, and took the opportunity to see Hong Kong as well. It was the late 80s, and Hong […]
Shanghai-ed
Shanghai: A Great Place to Refuel After a month or so of wandering China, Shanghai was a wonderful place to rest up. It’s very much a modern city, with all the bright lights, shopping, dining and entertainment venues one could ever want. It’s also got pockets of history, tradition and cheap eats if you wander […]
Xi’an
The city walls still stand around the heart of this city that was once the end of the Silk Road. It makes navigation that much easier: if you go too far in any direction you’ll eventually run into a wall. The city proper now extends far beyond, with new developments, housing and tourist centers popping […]
Forbidden City and Beyond
Seven hours and three sets of meal vouchers after our China Southern flight should have taken off from Seoul, it finally did. Maybe we should have paid more attention to the delay as an omen of things to come (for better or worse, we were about to be slowed to a crawl by China’s queues […]
Lost in Translation: Trying to Eat in Qingdao
As we ventured away from the metropolis of Beijing we were very limited on the choice of cities to visit. The reason for this was our neglect in purchasing a train ticket before nearly all destinations were sold out. We thought we might have to pony up for a plane ticket. As it turned […]
Bike Sokcho
Our lodging, The House Hostel offers free bikes to guests, so an afternoon of cycling was a must. The port serves as the terminal for Russian ferries (the only one in S. Korea), and the signs in this area are in Russian and Korean. One friendly local kept trying to welcome us and (unsuccessfully) strike […]
Abai, Autumn in My Heart, and Squid
Eating has been an ongoing challenge for us in Korea, not because of any lack of tasty options, but because of our inability at times to access them. The biggest issue, of course, is language. After a month in Japan, where language was essentially no problem ( even though it’s rusty, I can make myself […]