I'm currently in the middle of a 22 hour train ride from Guilin to Shanghai. It's been a long trip, and there's just under a week before I arrive back in Toronto on June 4. Mobile internet access here is relatively inexpensive compared to Canada (88 RMB per month gives me 200 minutes, unlimited incoming and 30 MB of internet access, that's roughly $13 or $14 CAD). So I'm happily tethering my notebook to my phone over Bluetooth right now

The trip has been a lot of fun and we've seen a lot of things. Overall China feels more haphazard than Canada. But there's so much rich culture and scenery to see here. Plus the food is awesome and relatively inexpensive when compared to Canadian prices.

Having grown up in Toronto with Singaporean parents, my Chinese food exposure has been primarily Cantonese-style and Singaporean-style. But having traveled to various regions across China, I've been able to expose myself to some different types of food such as some foods in Haerbin and Chengdu, to name a couple.

It's been good! But I'm looking forward to getting home. We'll stop in Hong Kong for a couple days before taking the long flight back to Toronto.

For those of you that didn't know, I'm currently traveling around Asia. After spending just over a week in Japan, a couple days in Taiwan, we have now been in China for roughly a week.

Currently in Beijing. Things here are fairly different here from Canada, or even Singapore.

My Mandarin has a lot of holes in it, but it's all I have to get around on when we can't call on the help of bilingual hostel staff.

A current feat of success has been booking a domestic flight from Haerbin to Chengdu in Mandarin.

A current feat of failure has been not being able to book a train from Beijing to Haerbin (which I thought would have been easier than booking the flight).

Ordering food is usually facilitated by picture menus... but I'm not sure how that will be once we get out of Beijing. The only items I order without the help of the menu are steamed rice and tea. Oh and "man tou" or other simple things that I know the names for already.

I originally intended to write here frequently about what has been going on during our trip, but it's often difficult to find the time to write. Perhaps evident by the fact that we're already half-way through our trip and this is the first entry I've written

Japan was neat. We saw both smaller towns and also larger cities. Went to a natural hotspring and stayed in a capsule hotel among other things. People say that Japan is really expensive. In a lot of ways though, when converting prices back to Canadian dollars, they actually worked out similarly to the prices we're used to paying for food and what not. But that's what makes it expensive. Imagine eating out for every meal for a week. That becomes expensive very quickly. Eating nice Japanese food is comparably expensive. So we ended up eating cheaper stuff a lot like udon or rice.