I took the morning train from Guilin to Kunming. It is a 22 hour train ride, so there is really nothing to be lost or gained from taking the AM or PM departure. But Lisa in Yangshou was able to get me the am one, which is 25% less. Aside from the usual chaos that ensues whenever a large group of Chinese people attempt to do something at the same time, the boarding process was not eventful. Each car has about 10 cabins in it, with six bunks per cabin. It was about freezing in the compartment, but there was no heat, so we all just bundled up and slept in our clothes. I took a good long nap, because it was necessary to get up very early in Yangshou to get the bus to Guilin ... read more

After an overnight 10 hour bus ride from Guangzhou, which was an experience in and of itself. It was a nice bus, with a cabin attendant and snack service, but the road was really bad, and the bus slide off it once. We ended up in the gravel median, after which we just started going again. There were lots of concerned looks among the fellow passengers, but in the end, we just went back to sleep and hoped for the best. We arrived in Guilin at about 6:30am, and the city was still awakening. I swung by the station restroom on my way out, and have not smelled something that bad in my 24 years on this planet. Nothing has come close to the gag inducing odor this restroom had. Enough said. I walked into the ... read more

After arriving in Narita Airport, I was amazing at how formal everything was. This country loves white gloves. The customs officials wear them, the taxi drivers wear them. Even the train greeters wear them. Narita airport is amazing. Nice, new and of course, very clean. It is, however, not in Tokyo. They may call it 'Tokyo Narita Airport', but that would be the same as calling Portland Oregon's Airport 'Seattle Airport'. Depending on where in Tokyo one is, it can take 2.5 hrs to get to. That aside, it is great. My lodging for the two days was at the Tokyo International Hostel, right in the middle of the city in Iidibashi. Tokyo has a strange layout, for instead of having one core downtown, there are smaller downtown areas that form a ring around the city. ... read more

Once the program was over, before I could head back to Seattle, I had one day to kill. A classmate from mine was going to visit family outside of Brussels, invited me to stay with him, and thus solved the problem of what to do with the extra day. We shared a taxi with Aphrodite and Niccoleta (both from the Masters program in Portsmouth) and then took the train into North Brussels from the airport. After dropping off our bags, we headed into town and I was able to get the idea of the flavour for the capital of Europe. It perhaps would have been nice to have done this sometime before the day of my departure from the continent, but I was thankful to have made a brief pass through before flying back to North ... read more

Between the end of my British semester in Portsmouth and the IMPREST conference back in Maastricht, I was able to throw together a EU financed stopover in Dublin. Since the conference funding covered airfare for the participants, out of options for going between southern England and southeastern Holland, the routing through Dublin made the most sense. How lucky for me! In fitting fashion, the taxi ride from Bournemouth to the airport (after spending the same amount as the airplane ticket taking the train there from Portsmouth) cost 2/3 as much as the flight to Dublin. The reason that I ended up doing this routing was because my Russian buddy Alex (former roommate from Lithuania) now lives here. He had to work and couldn’t meet me at the airport (as if this was a significant problem for ... read more