"Look at all those people," I say as we pull into our hotel and the bus
just about runs over a bystander. After 20 hours of flying and
traveling we have arrived in our hotel. The travel time was not that
bad actually; I made nice acquaintence with a 16 year old
Chinese-American dude from Texas. His name is Josh. We
talked a bunch and he even let me watch a cheesy Chinese kung-fu movie
with him. Moderately sleeping in a cramped area helped make the trip go
faster. Josh and I played a bit of video games which was fun as well.


Most of my thinking when I got into Japan was "I cant believe I am in
Japan." As we walked through Narita, I just had a huge smile on my face
the whole time. I eagerly walked up to a woman in a booth and asked,
"Can I have one of these?" pointing like a kid at halloween to a
bookmark that had Japaneese characters all over them. She allowed and I
observed the interesting separation of garbage as I threw out my gum.
The . . . Read More..

Right now it is 5:30 AM in China. It is so easy to wake up this early here. I think I woke up at 4 AM and then I took a cab alone out to find an open internet cafe. The driver didn't know any English, but the hotel people helped him with what I wanted. The place is packed right now with people playing games and hanging out. The driver stopped in the middle of the road and asked for directions. It was interesting.

Anyway in regard to yesterday's activities, we started off the day by taking the bus to the bund river. On the drive over on this large freeway, I noticed many of the small apartment buildings (all owned by the government) had all of their laundry hung out to dry on bamboo sticks.

This is the huge river port that separates the old city from the new. And for those of you who don't know, there is a lot of European influence here because of the affects of the opium war and the occupation of France and England. When we arrived there were hundreds of Chinese tourists. . . . Read More..