Harrison H K

Just a quick update: I spent the last few days in Kunming, a nice city with only 6 million people....writing that seems crazy but it's much less than most of the other cities I've been in. Today I'm taking a bus 20 hours south to the China/Laos border. There I can buy a visa and exchange my RMB for Lao KIP which is worth about 15,000 to 1 USD. Wow. I will spend the next 1 1/2 - 2 weeks in Laos before heading back up to Beijing for my flight home. I'm not sure where I'll have internet, but I will write when I can find it. Peace. ... read more

The last time I wrote I was in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia. Today I'm in Yinchuan, the capitol of the Ningxia autonomous region in northern central China, and home to China's Muslim minority, the Hui. I arrived two nights ago after a ten+ hour train ride and found my way to Ningxia's only hostel. I befriended a 27 year old Chinese man named "Tony" who was traveling with his wife "Sandy", Tony's younger sister, and both their mothers and fathers. Sandy had two masters dagrees relating to international relations and communications and both of them were about to start their Phd. work in the fall (their english was excellent). Yesterday we went to an ancient part of the Great Wall in the nearby desert that was used as a defense against the Mongolians during the Ming dynasty. ... read more

I have a game: Anyone who can guess what city I'm going to next will win something awesome. I'm not sure where it will be yet, but I'm deciding today, and it will be somewhere west of Beijing. Best of luck! Oh, and because China is so big you get three guesses. Yesterday I went and saw Transformers 2 in Chinese . . . with Chinese subtitles. I coulnd't understand much of anything they were saying, but my guess is it didn't really matter anyways cause the visual effects were amazing. The Olympic Forest Park is beautiful, and after walking around for a while and exploring the rest of the olympic grounds it finally started to rain, and rain it did. Hard. I got soaked through but it was great fun and I bought ice cream ... read more

Wow, talk about a long commute. After a 9 1/2 hour plane ride to Tokyo, a 3 hour layover followed by a 3 1/2 hour ride to Beijing, and three different check points serviced by employees with masks and eye goggles I finally . . . got out of the airport at 12am (it was a brisk 80 degrees). Next I bargained for a taxi that turned out to be sketchy as hell, but no worries, after a half hour ride around Beijing's 4th circle, we finally made it through the narrow alleyways of Xuanwu District and found the hostel. ... read more