going to Shanghai

For winter vacation, I went back to Thailand. I had worried about what to do with my coat and jeans (since I didn't want to carry them around Thailand, but I didn't want to be cold on the way to the airport,) but it's lucky I decided not to stow them at the airport here in Busan, because it snowed on me during the layover in Shanghai.

Because I was outside.

In Shanghai.

Which I don't think is legal.

Americans are supposed to have a $160 visa in order to get through immigration, but the Shanghai airport doesn't have a very efficient transfer process, so I went out through immigration and customs, and then back in again. In between, and with great trepidation, I went outside into the snow. I didn't, like, know of anything to see in Shanghai or how to get around or have any yuan, so it was brief but invigorating.

This is the Shanghai airport:


And this is part of an article in the English-language newspaper at the Shanghai airport. Busan had a 96-year low temperature and they shut off the water in my city! (Jangyu is a division of Gimhae.) (Luckily it was over the weekend and I was in Busan anyway.)


I'll show you the first part of my Thailand trip tomorrow :-)

all my bags are packed and I'm ready to go

The computers at the airport weren't working, so the ticketing procedure involved the Asiana staff running back and forth with peoples' passports to a back room somewhere and hand writing boarding passes. Understandably, this delayed the flight since folks had to wait so long to check in.

Mistakes are bound to happen with handwritten boarding passes. I had the same seat number as another girl, but Asiana sorted it out. When we exited the plane she grabbed my TEFL International backpack for me, since I had stowed it a few rows back on account of the seating weirdness. She recognized the logo as she is also a TEFL alumni who has been working in Spain for the last two years. With a US passport, mmm hmm. Of *course* she's here for EPIK too, but she'll be teaching in Seoul.

The flight was painless. I watched some movies that I would not otherwise have watched, and some that I wanted to see (Date Night, with Steve Carell and Tina Fey, which was not as funny as it could have been; Valentine's Day, which I enjoyed but will later claim to have watched only because of the pitiful selection of movies available; Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief, which varied from the book but I dug it, and The Back-Up Plan with... um... J-Lo playing a baby-crazy woman who um... God it was awful. I knew it would be awful and I watched it anyway and it just was.)

I took a bus to Jeonju University where I will stay for ten days of orientation, and on day nine I will learn where I will spend the next year. I've been living out of backpacks and suitcases for the last four months, so I'm excited to get a whole apartment to myself.

leaving home ain't easy

I left Ban Phe at the end of July.

I spent a few days toward the end with Autumn in Bangkok while she got her Korean visa, and we spent much time at this sanctuary, in an alley off of Khao San Road.



It's an old house, with fabulous paintings on the inside. Perfect for a fabulous party.



When I did leave, I had a stopover in Seoul for a few hours before crossing the pacific. I saw some things in Seoul.

Gyeongbokgung Palace!





Another Starbucks!



And then I went back to the airport and flew over the ocean.

I have to have a berth or I cannot get to sleep.

Ban Phe, it seems, sucks the will to blog even about places I've already been to and enjoyed.

Well after visiting the two big temple complexes in central Java, I visited the Sultan's Palace. Central Java still has a Sultan, and he still lives at the palace, which means that you can't actually go inside any of the buildings. Here is a picture, taken from as close as I could get, of a hall of some sort.



I visited a market, and another market, and a batik place, and a Muslim hospital where a new friend's nephew was recovering from... "How do you say it in English? Blood fever?"

Wai-wai-wait, I thought. What kind of bizarre medeival illness will I take with me from this hospital? I went anyway, and it turned out it was Dengue fever. Oh. Dengue fever. I can deal with that.

(The first month in Thailand my TEFL class and I were all deathly afraid of Dengue. One fella thought he had contracted it but it turned out to be not-Dengue. The symptoms were described to me as "you feel like you will absolutely die, for about two weeks, and then you get better.")

Luckily, I did not come out of it with Dengue.

Other highlights of my Fabulous! Nine! Days! On! Java! (You really must go, you really must. I just can't write much about it right now in this Internet cafe...) include the bicycle rickshaw! I felt ickily colonial being escorted in a carriage behind a motorbike in Cambodia. But in Yogyakarta, the rickshaw drivers propel you through the streets by the strength of their worldly bodies. I took one trip on one, to the train station when I left, and all I could think the whole time was "I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry."



That's my bicycle rickshaw guy. He's cool. Then I took the night train to Jakarta, which is not suited to photographs. The trains on Java do not have berths and I had to try to sleep in a (very comfortable, Executif) seat. In the morning went to the airport.

Look, it's the airport!


And a handful of the 13 thousand Indonesian islands I didn't visit on my trip!


And then I was back in Thailand.

some Indonesian junk

After a few days in Ban Phe, including a wicked-awesome karaoke night with Annie, who was back in town for a few days, I flew to Indonesia.

They turned on a fog machine for my grand rockstar entrance onto the plane and everything!



Because I would arrive in the middle of the night, I booked a room ahead of time. Behold!



I did not plan much about this trip. I knew how to get out of Jakarta (by train) and that I wanted to go to Yogyakarta and see the temples at Borobudur and Prambanan. I figured that Jakarta, being big and dirty and one of the most polluted cities on Earth, was not worth my attention. I was totally wrong.

I came back from Stasiun Gambir in a tuk-tuk after buying my ticket for the following day. Tuk-tuks in Jakarta have ragtops and cute little carnival-ride doors.



When I got back to my room, I took a bubble bath with an extremely overpriced Cosmo I had purchased in the airport. I went out to get something to eat, thinking I would eat dinner, go back to my room and pack, and then read until I went to bed. I was not interested in Jakarta, and I did not bring my camera. Such folly!

I visited a row of restaurant stalls next to my hotel, and passed one with plates of fried deliciousness that looked like meat in the window. I kept walking until a fellow beckoned me to try some cake, and I said I'd like some cake for dessert but was looking for dinner. Where should I go? He led me back to the place with the golden window-food and ordered a plate of vegetarian deliciousness for me.

The food, he explained, is from West Sumatra. I had a potato dumpling thing, a boiled egg, and a pile of vegetables on rice with chili. It was fantastic. I talked to my new friend, Said, about things I didn't know about Indonesia and Islam, which was a lot about Indonesia and Islam. I didn't have room for cake but went back to his stand for some guava-lemon juice and then he showed me around the old city and explained the big old Dutch buildings, many of which are now museums. Some are posh restaurants or bars, but a lot of them are just abandoned, with trees growing inside them in the middle of the city. I guess a city only needs so many museums, and Jakarta has a heck of a lot of museums.

I didn't have my camera, of course, but here's an example seen from my taxi the next day.



And then we had authentic Javanese powdered coffee on a sidewalk in the old city. (I had tea, actually. You know me.) It was illuminating. The moral of this story: learn something about a place before you go there. I did plenty of research on Thailand, Cambodia and Laos before visiting, but very little on Indonesia except for how to get around. I'm very glad that I met someone who showed me some of the city, but next time I would certainly plan to spend more time in Jakarta to see all there is to see.