We spent most of December 29th lounging around Aaron’s apartment and watching TV. After all, that’s what vacations are for, right? Aaron had to teach a class in the afternoon, but Taara brought along some TV shows to watch and Aaron has a large collection of Chinese bootle…er…perfectly legal DVDs, so they kept us busy.

In the evening we found ourselves headed towards Miriam and Heather’s house (two of Aaron’s friends who also teach English here in Guangzhou). Aaron brought home Pizza Hut pizza (real, pork pepperoni! we don’t get that in Bangladesh) and we enjoyed a nice game of Settlers (especially nice because I won!).

But the real fun was to begin on Day 4 of our trip, December 30, when Aaron introduced us to one of the many multi-storied wholesale shopping malls in Guangzhou, where stores are crammed together like sardines. We were able to snap some pictures of some of the interesting things we saw, so that we could share them with you. Read More »»

Here are some sights and memories from our second day in China (December 28). We started off the day early, checking out of our hotel in Kunming and heading to the airport to check into our flight.

We were impressed by the amount of influence that Christmas has had here, decorations were everywhere and a Christmas tree was prominently displayed in the hotel lobby (as well as in several places at the airport). There were Santa Claus faces everywhere, but absolutely no nativity scenes, which demonstrates how commercialized/paganized is the version of Christmas that has “infected” China. Well, I guess you could make an argument that the Western version of Christmas is just as paganized (ask Taara, we’ve had that conversation every Christmas over the past few years), but it’s usually tempered by at least some of an emphasis on the Christ in Christmas. Not so here in China, they’ve only imported the materialistic and commercial version of the holiday. Read More »»

Leaving Bangladesh on December 27th was something like wading through a sea of white. The international airport was flooded with devout Moslems preparing for their pilgrimage to Mecca. Due to this, the normal flight schedule seemed to have been severely disrupted. There were also lines and lines of young men about to jump on planes to work for a labour company in some other country. David and I were quite amused by their line-up strategy; they were parked about three feet from the immigration door, and with literally no space between them, they were squashed like sardines in an imaginary tube! We were relieved to find out that we could circumvent this line and walked through immigration with no trouble at all. Our next serious concern was to find our gate number, since we had seen no mention of our flight on the display screens and our boarding passes didn’t say anything either! Read More »»

Good Morning, Singapore! This was the view out of our hotel room on our first (and only) day in Singapore. More photos of our day can be found in the media section.After a hearty breakfast at the hotel (our last chance to eat bacon for a while, since pork is not a common commodity in Bangladesh), we headed off to see the statue of Sir Stamford Raffles, the partner in the British East India Company who transformed Singapore from a small village into one of the greatest trading ports in the world. Read More »»

Taara and I have a bet on how many
people will figure out the riddle in the
title of this entry. Don’t let me down.
Hint: focus on the last two words.

~~ Around 5:30 PM (KST) ~~

We are about to leave Inchon Airport in Seoul on the continuation of our Singapore Airlines flight. It will deposit us in Singapore in approximately 6 hours, where Singapore Airlines have arranged accommodations for us overnight, since our flight to Dhaka only leaves Wednesday night at 8:30 PM (and we arrive there at 11:30 PM tonight). Read More »»