Blogs from Asia - page 13035

A few of you brought to my attention that I didn't include any information or, more importantly, any pictures of where we're staying in Phuket. We are in a condo on the south end of Bang Tao Beach a few hundred meters from the beach. The complex was newly built a couple of years ago. It's quite comfortable with a very large pool in the center and a good little restaurant right on the property. It has about 40 units in 5 buiildings. Bang Tao was originally a Muslim village and is still significantly so. There does not seem to be any unrest....except my getting woken at 5AM by the call to morning prayers. Fortunately, this is usually drowned out by the aircon. There is a lot of building going on. It seems that the Tsunami ... read more

MONDAY 12TH MARCH 2007 I decided to try and forget the tourist shop incident and make the most of the tour, assuming i was actually going where I had asked. After much confusion the mini bus eventually arrived and off we went to Kanchanaburi. I was exhausted from lack of sleep and got the worst place in the front of this ancient mini bus with my legs crushed. I couldn't sleep as I'd planned and feared for my life during most of the trip. At one point the steering wheel was dropping to bits and the driver was trying to fix it while driving along the motor way. When we eventually arrived we went to see a POW graveyard, then we were dropped off at the worst museum ever. There were some bizarre random relics ... read more

I went in for my first haircut last week. It was another great experience. There is something very odd about the salons here. They stay open until 11 PM, some even later. I inquired to a Chinese friend about it, and also read a little in a newspaper as to why this could be. Apparently some (in truth very few) hair cutting businesses are real ambitious businessmen…they use the salon as a cover for running a black market prostitution business. There are salons on every block, comparable to a Starbucks shop in Seattle (by the way, I am ironically typing this e-mail in a Suzhou Starbucks…who serve burnt and expensive lattes), and who don’t open until 9:30 AM. Supposedly the salons with dual prostitution businesses have the retro style spinning candy cane looking decorations outside ... read more

The Terra Cotta Warrior Soldiers are located in Lintong District, approx 1 1/2 hrs by car from Xi'an.....much of the area we saw is used for farming & very primitive. We read there are many factories producing computers, lg equipment & sewing machines in the district. The warriors were built in 246BC; are around 2,200 yrs old and were made of clay and hand painted. Emperor Qin Shi Huang had 700,000 laborers work for 37 yrs on his mausoleum, soldiers, horses with chariots. The scale of the warriors & horses is stunning. There are over 8,000 clay warriors, over 100,000 bronze utensils, chariots & horses. They are considered the 8th wonder of the world, the best preserved ruins of a primitive settlement, the earliest, the biggest, the most lavish and the most beautiful bronze chariots in ... read more

Today, we got the luck to have a free tour of Guangzhou thanks to our welcome university. We went to the temple of the Chen family’s ancestors I had already visited last Wednesday and we went to the Guangzhou museum which is in Yuexiu Park. As you already know how is the temple of the Chen Family’s ancestors, I will not tell you more about it. Let me just present you the Guangzhou museum… The pictures will explain you in a better way than mine what beautiful historical objects the museum encloses. ... read more