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Archive for the ‘cheap vacation’ Category

MARCH 26th—

So here I am…I’m in China! This morning I was thinking to myself how crazy it was that I was here. I’m over halfway around the world now. The time difference is officially the opposite as it is at home (just switch the am and the pm around). Now I feel really far away from home. Anyway, on to what I did the first day.

Once we got off the ship, my friends and I decided to just wander and explore the city. First off, the city is HUGE! If I had to describe it to someone I would say a very clean Manhattan (just triple the size) that looks like Vegas at night time. The first main street you walk down has the most insane amount of designer stores. People were waiting in huge lines out the door to just go inside one of them. Every place was so lavish too….the Burberry was about 10 stories high (they mostly just put offices on top of the actual store), but it still looked really big!

After wandering around for a little, we decided to just find somewhere to eat. Luckily, we were with my friend Wan Fang (Christina) who speaks Chinese she helped us translate. She actually had a lot of trouble talking to some people because not everyone there speaks Chinese, the other main language is Cantonese. In the end, she was able to translate with some of the younger people on the streets and we ended up going to a Chinese diner. It was really good. One of the people in my group was adventurous and tried pigeon. I ended up trying it and it actually wasn’t that bad. Anyway, we mostly got things with dumplings and that was seriously the way to go. The dumplings are always really good here, no matter where you eat. Another good thing I had was this drink called a floating pineapple. It’s this homemade pineapple juice with a whole pineapple at the bottom.

After lunch, we walked around to some stores and streets to see everything for a few hours. We went to a place for a small snack to hold us over until dinner time. We had a cultural miscommunication at the restaurant. When we sat down we were given green tea. At the end of the meal each of us was charged a couple extra dollars for the tea. We told the waitress that we never ordered this and she never told us it wasn’t free. Of course with the language barrier, she wasn’t getting it. A man sitting nearby heard our conversation and stepped in. He told me that sometimes in China; a cultural custom is to be given tea at the beginning of a meal. If you drink it or not, you always have to pay for it….it’s just sort of implied. Wow…totally missed that one! Anyways we paid and walked out. While we were walking out the man who helped us inside asked me where I was from, I told him the US and he said you must be from the west coast, I told him east coast and he was astonished. Uhhh…I don’t know you be the judge. Anyways, he moved to LA so his English was really good. Thankfully he not only helped us in the restaurant with our tea mishap, but gave us directions for the night market.

The night market was amazing. For block and blocks all you could see were white tents filled with vendors. They were selling some amazing stuff. They were really tough bargainers and really wouldn’t give in on some prices. In the end, we got some really good deals because we are really good at bargaining now! We got hungry after two and half hours or so and found a Japanese restaurant on the sidewalk in between two of the vendors. It was funny, because a lot of SAS kids I knew were there…I mean this place was not noticeable. Anyway, this was the best meal I have had in a port this far. I don’t know if it was because it was similar to American food or because it was mostly all made with salmon! They even had mango sushi! It was all really good and pretty cheap!

After dinner we walked around for about another hour or so and then decided to find the subway back to the ship to get ready to go out.

We took a cab to this place that everyone was telling us to go to for nightlife. It is this street that goes on forever and is just filled with bars, pubs and clubs. There were so many people in the street; you would have thought it was a rave. Everyone was dressed up in crazy costumes (I think for some rugby thing….but then again, we’re in Asia, and I heard anything goes here). We tried to go to this rooftop bar but we didn’t want to pay money to go up there, so we went halfway up and got to see an amazing view. We found all of our friends after a while. They were just blasting music out on the streets and everyone is singing and dancing. I had never experienced anything like this before. It was sort of like Mardi Gras and Carnival mixed together. Absolutely crazy! I’m mad because I didn’t bring my camera…I thought someone might steal it. But luckily, our friends brought cameras so I’ll just have to steal their pictures when I get home. Thank god for Facebook!

We stayed for 2 ½ -3 hours and then decided we had to head back to the ship. It was getting pretty late (like 2:30 am at this point), and I still needed to pack for my flight in the morning.

Overall, I really liked Hong Kong and would definitely go back again someday. I don’t feel like I can judge the city that much because I was really only there for one day and night. But I still had an amazing time and saw some pretty cool stuff.

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The Artist
As always, I will remind you, dear reader, that these words are my own and do not represent the United States Peace Corps, the Federal Government, or any other of the vast bureaucracies of the USA, infamous or unknown. The opinions shared here have not been condoned by any bureaucrat, living or dead, and I have not fallen prey to illusions of grandeur that would lead me to believe that either have they been condemned. And to misquote that cutie, Clark Gable, “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.” If that hasn’t bored you to death, please read on.

I want to tell you about a friend of ours, a wonderful artist, named Wilson Ngoni. (You can find him on Facebook.) He is in his early thirties, lives and creates here in Kopong, and shares his life with his beautiful daughter and her equally beautiful mother. We have been blessed to get to know them.

Steve had met Wilson briefly several weeks before I did, and we’d seen some of his work at the National Gallery in Gaborone. The day I met Wilson I’d arrived at the community library in Kopong to meet a friend and found him

Wilson at one of the galleries
standing in the library grounds deeply engaged in conversation with Wilson. He had a spiral bound book with photos of his artwork and some of his writings. The librarian, my friend, and I all spent quite some time paging through the book with Wilson as we listened with interest to the story of his journey as an artist and explanations of some of his work.

He’s done many pieces reflecting the devastation that AIDS brought to his country. Some of his surreal landscapes make me think of the work of Salvador Dali while other pieces are realistic and highly detailed. His work reflects many aspects of Botswana including wildlife, landscape, village scenes, and portraits. When the King of Sweden recently visited Botswana, he was presented with one of Wilson’s paintings.

Over these past few months we’ve had the pleasure of Wilson’s company on many occasions. An avid gardener, Wilson took as to a beautiful garden and plant nursery in the capital. He’s taken us to the lands where we’ve seen Botswana as I imagine it must have looked fifty years ago. We’ve seen the broad vistas of piled boulders and the wide desert valley from the hills near

Tradition
Lensweletau. He has visited our home. We’ve spent hours looking through his notebooks filled with sketches and experimental works using a variety of media. He now seems to have found his home with oil paints and the results are astounding.

I’ve had the pleasure of attending two of Wilson’s exhibits, one at a gallery and gift shop on the outskirts of Gaborone, the other at a gallery called Topong Art Gallery where resident artists can frequently be observed while working. The photos I’ve included in the blog can’t possible do justice to his work, but they will give you and idea of the range of his talents. Please note that the titles are my own, I don’t know what he has titled each of these works. I’m sure something much more suitable than what I’ve done, but I can’t publish them to the blog without a title.

We are grateful to have acquired one of the paintings that he named as a favorite of his and will be carefully bringing it back with us for family and friends to enjoy along with us.

A part of the display

One of my favorites

Hmm. Is that dinner?

Beautiful Baskets

Elephants

Sunflowers

African Sun

o montle

The One in Our Care

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26 March 2011
We have been very lax about putting our short trips on the travel blog. They go on the LJ but they can be hard to find there. So, here we are at the Kingfisher in Shillingford. The pub is small and quiet and comfortable. The food is superb. Last night we both had stifado with mixed stir fry veg and saute potatoes which was delicious. Breakfast (full English) was high quality everything and perfectly cooked to order. It was not huge but that actually suits me better.

Shillingford itself is very pretty. Yesterday we amused ourselves by wandering round part of the village where they were filming Midsomer Murders – round the corner from here. They were actually filming and we may have seen famous people we didn’t recognise.

Today we walked. We walked along the Thames Path to Shillingford Bridge then took the bridle path up to Whittenham Clumps and all the new eco projects in that area. They were running a family day ‘lambing weekend’ but we managed to see pretty ell everything except the cafe and the visitor’s centre without getting caught up in that. What we did see looked like an excellent family day out with baby lambs, lamb burgers, tractor rides, crafts, face painting etc etc. We saw the arbortoreum (willows) and Neptune woods (a battle of Trafalgar commemoration project of very young oak trees. We walked on to Clifton Hamden and had a lemonade and orange at the Barley Mow, then back along the Thames Path to Days lock.

From Day’s lock it’s not far back along the path to Shillingford.

We do not walk fast. We amble. And we stop a lot to look at things. We saw birds. Red kites, chaffinches, great tits, back birds, a cormorant or two, geese, swans, ducks, moorhens, coots, robins, hedge sparrows, a sparrow hawk ad a woodpecker. And rabbits.

It took us about 7 to 8 hours. Now we are back in the Kingfisher Inn. We have had baths and we have a piint of Brakspears each.

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Our plant-keen farm friend Dean kindly reminded me that I HAVE been away from Canada for too long as even though i conferred with Jenna as to the colour of coltsfoot (which is YELLOW, NOT blue) we both were incorrect. The fact that i misrepresented one of my favourite flowers is unsettling but i will get over it. We found out that Alex’s son Galen is 2 now and that was a mindblower as we remember him as a quite floppy just-learning-to-walk young toddler. So much has changed and so much more will undoubtedly continue to change.

We are on the safe side of Oz for all who wondered about floods, cyclones and tsunamis. We received a few inquiries as to our proximity to such cataclysms and the answer we are no where near them and only moving further away from their locales. I am sure bad things happen in Tasmania but not so much in the way of giants waves and tropical storms.

We just finished up a stellar weekend that began with a local punk show featuring a funk-hardcore band (yes it IS possible) and we rounded off with a massive electronic music festival that took place in the central park here in Adelaide. These are events at polarised ends of the live-music spectrum but we enjoyed them both. The local show took place at a small bar with cheap beer and friendly patrons- a fine way to get to the heart of a city’s character and the evening was relaxed but heaps of fun. the future music festival is a monster one day that was headlined by electronic mega stars the Chemical Brothers. The tickets were 150$ so we snuck into the show using backstage passes for the local fringe festival. The fringe bar club was adjacent to the music festival and we were able to just waltz in completely unbothered by police or security who seemed to not care at all. If we had paid for the event we would have been disappointed but for free it was great. Lots of young trendy locals were treating the afternoon event as a giant rave so people were messed up and puking in the streets and crying and all that but most folks managed to keep themselves in order. It really hit home how behind the times we are with new music as we knew almost none of the bands playing yet thousands of crowded people seemed to know all the words to every song played. It wasn’t the best festival by any means but once again.. for free it was a great way to spend a day. Seeing Chemical Brothers was something Jenna and I planned on as they played Toronto a few weeks before we left Canada but we had to opt not to for lack of spare time in getting prepared to ship out. Their show was stupendous but that said we still left 20 minutes before the end to avoid the large and unruly crowd.

So far Adelaide though known for being a snooty and sleepy place has been a blast and as long as we are stuck waiting here for documents we should keep having fun.

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Part of the trip: India, Southeast Asia, Australia, etc.

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