UnorthodoxY Archive It's wasn't what you thought

Right, I know I missed a couple of posts there. Actually I only missed one but my post scheduled for the 28th didn’t work for some reason. It was a tech-post, I’ve retro-posted it anyway. No excuse for that, I have an excuse for last weekend as I was off travelling again.

First stop was one of my favourite cities: Hong Kong. I love Hong Kong. It’s pretty close to my perfect city, big enough to have lots of interesting things to do. Small enough to be easy to navigate. It’s got a brilliant mix of western and eastern influences and it’s just one of those cities where you can find something for everyone.

But there’s no way I could live there. Not only would the language barrier be too much but it’s just way too expensive. The money I spent in 36hours there would have done me a month in Manila. Maybe a slight exaggeration but it’s close.

After that I was in Shenzhen, China for work. It’s one of the big cities in southern China that attracts a lot of business due to the proximity to Hong Kong. Unlike that other nearby city I’ve been to, Guangzhou, it’s pretty nice. It’s only been around in it’s present form 30 years and so it has decent roads, and public transport. This makes it all a little too spread out for my tastes, but it’s fun for a few days. Since I was working I didn’t get any chance to do anything interesting, although the guys I was with did take a detour to pick up a really impressive looking knock-off iPhone. If it turns out to work even half as impressively as it looks then it’s a pretty good buy for £40 or so.

Being in China again did make me appreciate living in Manila, even though you’ll not hear much English spoken here pretty much everyone can speak English. In Shenzhen we were lucky to find a handful of people who could understand us, even in the touristy places. Maybe I’ll stay for a weekend next time I’m their and do a bit of sightseeing, but I get the impression it’s pretty much all businesses and shopping centres catering to people on a day trip from Hong Kong.

After all that I’ve been living a pretty quiet life, actually cooking for a change and trying to save money after Hong Kong.

Which is good because I’m off to Shanghai next weekend, completely random bonus holiday as my Chinese visa was only good for three months and work don’t need me to go back. So I figured, why not?

After that I’m back for a bit and then it’s Australia, for a proper holiday not just a mad long weekend.

For a while it was looking like I was going to end up doing a stupid round-the-world trip after that, heading to the US and then Europe and basically travelling for all of May. But the US part of that, at least, has been delayed. Which is good, I like travelling but that might have been a bit much, the organisation involved would have been insane, but it would pretty much have guaranteed me a weekend in Vegas on the way between two of my stops.

Hopefully I’ll have time to queue up a post for next weekend when I’m in Shanghai. Hopefully it’ll have more content.