Back to school

Hey so the upper right corner of this page now features a link to the photos I've taken so far (yes all 780 of them). They're not all in chronological order though but hopefully google will implement a feature to auto-arrange them by date/time taken.

So last night we started at the school-- the "Children's Palace" (yes a partner establishment to Michael Jackson's "Neverland"). But yeah it went reasonably well, 4 classes over 3 hours and all were 5-7 years old and so forth. Not quite sure of the demographic background of these children but they appear to be fairly middle class and not the poverty-stricken bunch I at one point had imagined helping but hopefully we'll be able to volunteer in other ways since we are only teaching in the evenings and on the weekends.

Also, met up with Benny last night (who went to grad school with my sister) which was great. The first restaurant we went to had run out of food (!) so we went somewhere else and met up with a bunch of friends he'd met since moving here in July. Two friends of his live just around the corner from us apparently so may be meeting up with them at some point. Also, Benny's been working quite hard I think (he left the office at 10 the other night) as he's basically been put in charge of the (Clinton) Foundation's Vietnamese operations.

Am going to walk around a bit of the city and hopefully see a movie later!! Will post more back info soon. And look at the photos!

Vietnamese trains

Are not as modern and fast and sexy as Chinese trains. That was the lesson of the day coming from Beijing to Hanoi on the old 2-overnight train (small fish compared to our Trans-Mongolian pilgrimmage). So the room here is pretty nice, AC works quite well, shower's a bit all over the place but you know can't be too picky. Having lunch with Mr Hung, our coordinator, in an hour to sort stuff out and will hopefully have dinner with Benny tonight. I think we're going to walk round the hood a bit but will talk about supafly Beijing next time before I forget it all! And upload some of the 700 photos taken so far (though this computer is quite slow so who knows...)

Mongolian Desert not cold

So am chillin on the platform in Sainhand (a city in Mongolia) and was thinking to myself "wow its a bit warmer than it was yesterday" and then I remembered thats cos we were in the Gobi desert whereas yesterday we'd been in Siberia... really quite confusing when you'd just been getting used to the old Siberian September sub-zero pleasantries.

So the week-long Trans-Siberian/Trans-Mongolian 8000km train is over and we are rocking out in Beijing French Embassy style. The residence here isn't as pretty from the outside as it is in Moscow but the room is far larger and sexy so not too bad. Got to meet up with Chace last night (after just getting in off the big momma 7 day train a couple hours before) and went out for dinner and drinks so was very nice welcome to the city/country/continent (my first time in Asia). Super helpful to know someone who can speak Chinese (i.e. Chace) and has been living here for the past few months so knows the lay of the land a bit.

Stuff is just so cheap-- a taxi across town that would cost £30 in London costs £1.50 here. We had dinner and I had thought each thing would be a small sort of tapas-esque situation (given that each thing was between £1 and 2) and alas we literally had enough food to feed a family of 4, the waiters were laughing at the end when we had half of it put in containers to take away (which we then gave to a mother and child who were begging for food on the way back to the embassy). Anyway so slowly getting used to the whole price level being 1/10th that of London.

French keyboards are a bit poo so going to sign off now-- photos still forthcoming-- I've filled up 1GB already so not quite sure how I'm going to get them off the card yet but stay tuned!

Mockba

heyhey so Berlin has come and gone and we're now in Moscow, which is big and expensive and full of people who don't speak English and don't seem too bothered about this fact. I keep trying to tell them the Cold War is over and they don't need to fear me anymore but they don't seem to want to listen. Ah well. So ya got in last night and despite the lonely planet estimated cost of a taxi being 100R ($4) the first guy was gonna charge us $50 so we pursued the metro situation where we found a queue of literally 100+ people. So back out onto the street we finally found a taxi to take us for the amazing bargain of $20 + 200R. Though there were at least 3 moments during the trip I could've sworn we were going to die which would probably have made the $20+200R poor value since I don't think funeral services were included ;-)

Saw the cool cathedrals and soviet govt buildings in the Kremlin this morning which was good fun. I wanted to ask a guard if he would pose with me for a photo but I wasn't sure the US Embassy was open on weekends to bail me out of jail so thought better not. In general things here seem to be geared towards the very top echelons of society (not unlike NY or London I suppose) and people aren't particularly friendly but I'm hoping the 5 and a half days on the Trans-Siberian will hold for us nicer Russians :-) the hardest thing I would say is navigating since my map has the street names in the roman alphabet whereas all the street signs are in cyrillic ;-(

anyway, will post photos and stuff soon! xx

...and we're back!

So in light of the whole going away thing it seemed about right to do some more of this blogging malarky. Itinerary is as follows for your convenience:

(9/18) London->Berlin (9/19)
(9/21) Berlin->Moscow (9/22)
(9/26) Moscow -> Beijing (10/2)
(10/5) Beijing -> Hanoi (10/7)
-- Hanoi for 2 months with trips (hopefully) to Hong Kong, Kuala Lampur, surrounding Northern Vietnamese countryside, etc.--
(12/7) Hanoi -> not quite sure yet (Southern Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, possibly Burma?)

So yeah! In those sorts of respects I think we're almost ready to go. Should probably pack first though. (p.s. this is mostly to reaffirm I can still post on this thingie).

Cool people: