Here are all the blogs I’ve gone back and updated with photos, if you don’t have me on facebook or are interested enough to check them out. You can go to the right and click the archives drop box to find the month they were written in, saves you some time:
August 16, 2011: The Inner Mongolian Grasslands
September 13, 2011: The Mountains
October 14, 2011: Journey to Beijing
October 16, 2011: Touring Beijing, ie. Puke Crawl 2011
October 19, 2011: The Great Wall of China
October 24, 2011: Qingdao Day 2
October 27, 2011: Qingdao day 3
October 28, 2011: Reuniting with Beijing, encountering Zombies, and the journey home!
October 29, 2011: When Thunder Bay tours Hohhot + Steph’s first bout of homesickness
November 1, 2011: Happy Halloween!
December 14, 2011: My First Chinese Wedding Experience
January 2, 2012: OH MY Shanghai
February 4, 2012: Vietnam!
February 9, 2012: The Lantern Festival
March 1, 2012: Lost in Translation
April 9, 2012: Beijing Round 2
April 16, 2012: Xi’An
April 27, 2012: Chengdu and Emei Shan
May 26, 2012: More Goodbyes
May 29, 2012: Tears and Rain
Currently, Kathryn and I are in Cambodia! We went to 4000 Islands but it was so incredibly, can’t-stand-it hot that we left after one night and escaped to Phnom Phen, Cambodia! There, we randomly but awesomely visited a shooting range and shot 2 types of guns: an M16 and AK-47, whatever that means. They were big and powerful and embarrassment aside, there was a lot of screaming/squealing from both Kathryn and myself, from when we held them for the first time, anticipating the first gunshot, and basically throughout the entire shooting ordeal. It was fun though. I originally wanted to shoot a small, hand-held gun but they were out of bullets for them. Good times!
Following this, we ventured to the Killing Fields (the Choeung Ek location), a memorial museum and historical site that commemorates the genocide of over 3 million Cambodians during the Khmer Rouge regime. At this particular site over 17000 people were murdered and buried in mass graves between 1975 and 1979. We did an audio tour of the area, where we were guided through the fields where you can still see the large impressions in the ground where the graves were discovered while getting a lot of historical background on the process, evolution and outcome of that particularly horrendous chapter of Cambodian history. There’s a Stupa in the middle of the fields that is filled with over 5000 human skulls found in the grave site. It was very haunting to witness up close. We didn’t take any pictures with Kathryns camera because it felt wrong, somehow.
Our second day in Cambodia was literally spent reading at a cute little Cambodian cafe near our hostel called 50 Cents Cafe. 6 hours spent there reading and eating, I consider this a day well spent! It was too hot outside to venture anywhere else, or so we told ourselves. We took a bus that night to Siem Reap, where we are now! It’s been raining (considerably hard!) ever since we got here, so we haven’t done much here either. There’s an interesting pub street and huge night markets that we checked out, but we haven’t gone to the popular Angkor Wat temple because it would be a very wet experience, considering most of it’s outside. So basically, Cambodia has been a very relaxing experience. I haven’t soaked in any of the culture because we’ve stuck to touristy areas, but I find that travelling doesn’t allow that sort of cultural experience that I got while living in China. Choosing between the two, I think I prefer living somewhere and learning more about the culture and daily life of the people as opposed to travelling somewhere for 2-4 days and seeing everything noteworthy in that time. Just my opinion though. 🙂
Heading to Vietnam by night bus tonight! Can’t wait!