Cambodia

Hey everybody! We have been spending the past week admiring the ruins of Angkor Wat in Siem Reap, Cambodia. We'll post plenty of awesome pictures later, but for now, just google Angkor Wat and check it out a bit for yourself. I kinda thought it might suck a bit and be boring, but it was definitely my favorite thing so far! Basically, it is a huge old abandoned city that i got to crawl around on and bike through for days!

Right now, we are in Phnom Pehn, the "Pearl" of indochina, and as kitty likes to call it, "The asian capital of depression."

Tomorrow we are fleeing this city and treking back off to Botum Sakor, into the wilderness of the Cardamom rainforest. We might not have internet access for a little while, so bye bye!

Koh Tao (Turtle Island)

We spent the last five blissful days on Koh Tao in the Gulf of Thailand. The least pleasant part was at the very beginning - we had to take a three-hour boat ride over here, and it was probably the most excruciating three hours of my life. We each threw up about five times, but one guy behind us was practically vomiting the whole way, making comically horrible sounds every single time. Anyway, after a brief period in hell, we reached this tropical paradise. We did some splashing around on its pristine beaches:

We decided to get scuba certified at a resort here. Here's our instructor, teaching us how to keep our lungs from exploding:
After three days of class and one practice dive, we were ready to hit the water. They took us out to the dive sites on a big, three-story boat. Andy was pretty excited that they let him jump off the roof a few times, and even I had to jump off the second story for some corny trick in our dive video. They were taping us the whole time so that they could try to sell us a personalized dive video for $80.
Here's our whole dive group, decked out in wet suits. It was surprisingly chilly in the water, especially after forty minutes or so.
Andy insisted that we include a picture of the two Brazilians in our group, who became our buddies. Their names were Pablo and Leandro, and they were adorable.
We didn't get any pictures underwater, because we dove down to 18 meters, and Andy's camera can only survive to 10 meters. Of course, we could have bought the corny video... Anyway, Andy took pictures of the underwater life while he was snorkeling one day. We think these were nudibranches, and they were awesome!
Here's some of the different types of coral just off the beach. You can see lettuce leaf for sure, I think the other stuff is brain coral.Coming home after a long day of scuba diving.
We went to a different part of the island for one night, where we stayed in fancier bungalows that would've been really wonderful, if it hadn't been for the rooster that stood next to our bungalow and crowed every five minutes starting at sunrise. We rode scooters there! I was fully terrified at first, but it was pretty fun by the end.
Also, Andy had to alter his beard for scuba diving. If you have hair on your upper lip, your mask can't form a seal against your face, and it constantly fills up with water. Therefore, he had to shave his mustache and looked like he was Amish. I guess this is a common affliction among divers, and our resort had a weekly contest called "Weird Beard Wednesday." Anyway, here's the hairstyle he ended up with after some experimentation. Let's have a vote: should Andy keep the new beard (Chopper Andy), return to Beard Classic, or move on to some new, ultra facial hair?
Also Holethings!

Thailand is fun!

So we got into Bangkok fine, and our wonderful couchsurfing/hostel owner hosts picked us up at 3:30 AM. Their place is really cool, plus it only costs the two of us 100 Baht (~$3) a night to stay there. We're heading out of Bangkok today, but we'll be back to their place toward the end of our trip. Here's a pic of a cool mural they've painted:

We visited some of Bangkok's wats, which are Buddhist temples. They were totally amazing! Here's the Golden Palace, in the compound where Thailand's beloved king lives:
I love these awesome protector demons they have everywhere in the palace:
At Wat Pho, they have the world's largest reclining Buddha. It's hard to believe that this huge statue is actually covered in gold, but it is.
Here I am at its feet:

The food is great so far! We even sort of had crab rangoon, which definitely doesn't exist in China, just like most other dishes you can order at Chinese restaurants in America. More updates to come!

Bye for now!

We're hopping on the plane to Thailand at midnight tonight! And, for our worried parents, we have arranged a place to stay for our first night in Bangkok, so we shouldn't end up sleeping in any doorways or anything. Anyway, the blog updates will probably be more sporadic. Happy (Chinese) new year, everybody!

Christmas Celebration and Mayhem

Here's an assembly of photos from various Christmas celebrations we had. Here I am lighting the potato menorah I constructed, because I'm not sure that Shenzhen is aware that Judaism exists and you can't find menorahs anywhere. I may look brain dead, but I'm actually just reciting the prayer.

Here's the potato in its full splendor on the last night of Hanukkah.

Our program threw us a party on Christmas eve at the awesome hotel we stayed at in September. We were all looking forward to a semi-Western Christmas dinner (most of us were at least hoping for french fries), but our program director apparently told the hotel staff that we didn't like their Western food and we wanted a Chinese banquet. Maybe HE did...

At the head of the banquet hall, there was a stage with lots of performances from our Chinese hosts that no one understood.

Here's our whole group. They gave us Santa hats!

Here's our buddy Zach playing Christmas carols for us. The smoke machine was a nice touch that he was unaware would be added to his performance. After he played all the Christmas songs he knew, an encore was requested, so he played some Pink Floyd.

Here's what Zach looked like on the TVs in the hall for people who were sitting too far away to see. Doesn't he look like he's green-screened in?

I set up a secret Santa program, which went surprisingly well. Amy, my secret Santa, is on the left, and I'm showing off her gift: a bottle of "Viagra"! We asked the Chinese people around, and it is, in fact, some kind of aphrodisiac liquor. I offered it to people jokingly, but everyone was so desperate for alcohol that it was gone within fifteen minutes or so. No reports back on whether it achieved its desired effect.

In an incongruous step, we spent a lot of the night playing truth or dare in the hotel lobby. In actuality, we were playing the drinking game 'asshole', but a lot of people weren't drinking. If you couldn't take a drink when you were supposed to, you had to subject yourself to a truth or dare. I know, you're thinking, "Shouldn't you stop playing truth or dare when you're 14 or so?" but we had a great time. A lot of the dares involved slightly traumatizing the hotel staff: Andy had to pelvic thrust at them, and our friend Kelsey had to recline seductively on one of their couches and make bedroom eyes at the staff. I think at an American hotel, we might've gotten kicked out for our antics, but the Chinese staff was just puzzled. We were not good cultural ambassadors. Above, our buddy Daren takes off his shirt in preparation for a topless cartwheel.

Here's Kate doing a table dance. In the lower right, you can see my hand with a watch timing the incident - I think she had to dance for a full minute.

Here's our buddy Veronica, who usually doesn't drink much but sure made an exception for Christmas, getting wheeled around by Zach and doing some kind of go-go dance.

Kelsey doing his aforementioned seductive poses.

This is definitely my favorite picture of the night. An inebriated Veronica punched Daren, I think because he didn't get permission from his wife before giving Kelsey a lap dance. Daren's reaction face is pretty priceless.

After our little party, we walked back up to that giant Buddhist statue by the hotel. Andy and Kelsey scaled it, which was pretty impressive. You can't really tell in the picture, but I think that's Kelsey (or Andy) sitting on the statue's head.

Here's a Japanese snack that Andy and I have been curious about for a while, so I got it for him for Christmas, along with some other trinkets, and an awesome hat, which unfortunately doesn't fit. The Every Burgers are pretty great! They're tasty little sandwich cookies, if anyone wants to know.

Another snack that I got Andy. We were almost too afraid to open the box!

Here's another Christmas party we went to - definitely the most scandalous of the three. There was a white elephant gift exchange, and one guy got this thong, which I guess is shaped like a stork... I don't want to get into it too much, but he definitely modeled it in a terrifying spring through the crowded apartment. Merry Christmas!

Hong Kong City Hike

After our trip to the Big Buddha, we decided to attempt to hike up Victoria Peak, the tallest mountain on Hong Kong island. There's a tram up it, but the line was incredibly long, and we'd already taken that cable car ride, so...

Unfortunately, the walking path up to Victoria Peak is pretty inadequate. You have to go through a lot of the city before you really hit the forest of the mountain, so the path keeps breaking off and restarting a little ways away. Eventually, we were walking on a road where first the sidewalks disappeared, then the road narrowed to one lane. I was pretty uncomfortable with it, since the taxis sped through this area with little concern to any pedestrians, so we turned back. The above picture shows our rather inadequate ascent.

We tried going up blocked-off paths a couple times. You can see they weren't very well-maintained, plus they petered out after 100 meters or so.

After we gave up, we went to an awesome public aviary in Hong Kong park. It was free, but it was the best aviary we've ever been to! Our personal favorite was the magnificent golden pheasant seen above. Andy agrees with me that it looks like a box of crayons.

Also in the aviary were cool shallow-rooted tropical trees, which have to grow these huge buttresses to make themselves bottom-heavy. After the aviary, we gorged ourselves on Indian food at Chungking Mansions and headed back home.

Unfortunately, we lost our rose-tinted glasses through which we saw Hong Kong when we came back to Shenzhen. Hong Kong is so much more concerned with the health, safety, and happiness of its citizens than Shenzhen is. Where Hong Kong has wonderful public gardens and lots of PSAs warning about Dengue fever and such, Shenzhen has huge, gaping holes in the sidewalk with no warnings or traffic cones to keep you from falling in and braining yourself. The people are more polite in Hong Kong too - they sometimes actually wait for the next subway instead of trampling those in their paths to shove into an already overcrowded car. Our first welcome back to Shenzhen was a rat we saw on the walk home! Welcome back to the mainland! Anyway, we'll forget about Hong Kong in a few days and get re-accustomed to the wilderness of Shenzhen.

Big Buddha

We took our first trip by ourselves to Hong Kong over our New Year's three-day weekend. It was also my favorite trip to Hong Kong so far, partly because we've finally grown accustomed to how expensive things are there. We decided to go see the Big Buddha, which is on one of Hong Kong's islands.

You can take a cable-car ride there, which was a little expensive but worth it for the views. It was also more commercialized than pretty much anything I've ever seen. There were a billion different keychains, t-shirts, etc. you could buy not to commemorate your trip to see the Big Buddha, but your trip on the cable car! There were also three different idiotic monkey characters somehow associated with the cable car, and you could buy any number of stupid knickknacks with their likenesses. I guess I probably would have wanted all this stuff when I was 7 or so, so the cable car company must have some marketing geniuses.

Here we are over the gorgeous bay.

I think this is a long shot of the Buddha, but I can't really tell. (ANDY: it is not, just a pic of the tram line)

The Buddha itself is pretty amazing. Here's a shot taken from the shadow of his hand. The Buddha is built facing the north, which was some kind of political bone thrown to Beijing to allow the Buddha to be built. I guess all other giant Buddha statues face south. Anyway, this fact makes it kinda difficult to photograph the Buddha, since the sun is often at his back. Check out the Wikipedia pages for better pictures of his face. Also, I think you can see the swastika on his chest, which I understand but is still weird to see.

This is the largest seated, outdoor, bronze Buddha statue in the world, which might seem like a lot of qualifiers, but it's pretty spectacular. It's huge and gorgeous. It was built pretty recently, completed in '93. It's made up of a lot of individual bronze castings, except for the face, which they had to do as one giant piece to ensure that it looks natural. They had over five kilometers of welding to do to fuse all the pieces into the Buddha.

There were lots of statues with Buddhist imagery surrounding the Buddha, and we didn't really understand any of them, but Andy really liked this lamp.

I surprised kitty with an impromptu picnic of a fresh baguette, strawberries, and brie cheese on the edge of the statue area.

Around the Buddha they had crazy weird trees that grew upside down.

Then we took the ferry back to Hong Kong island! More on that later.