Heres some things about mainland china that mom and I had a good (sometimes) time learning: People spit... Everywhere, everyone. Apparently it's not considered rude. Squat toilets are the way it is. Chinese are only allowed 1 child in the city, 2 in rural areas. People are only allowed to drive 6 out of 7 days of the week. Big cites in china have millions of tourists per year, but we've discovered many many of them are Chinese. There apparently aren't many w...

These past two days have really redeemed hong kong for me. My original impression was big city, good shopping, multicultural, nice waterfront, good transportation. Sound like Vancouver much? But we've seen so much natural beauty just minutes out of the big city. If I were to return to hong kong, I'd base myself on one of the islands instead. Warm, semi tropical, green, and beautiful, yet still close enough to the big city to make a short hop over. Not that great...

This morning we checked out of our hostel with the intention of making it over to the backside of hong kong island, namely Stanley and Aberdeen. We hopped on the MTR and passed under the ocean to hong kong island central station. Once we got off, I realized something really really dumb: I had lost my MTR ticket. Somehow it had slipped out of my back pocket. After you ride, you must return your ticket to exit. We went to information and they said they typically ch...

Today was market day. After we had grabbed some breakfast, we hopped on the MTR to bring us up further into Kowloon so we could walk back to our hostel, market hopping on the way. I went to bed last night with a developing cold and mom's stomach is still a bit upset, so we took it easy. But we decided we'd much rather be shopping then sulking in our closet-room. And it's really nice and warm out again! We started out at the bird market, flower market, and goldfi...

So this morning was one of those unfortunate ones. Our train got in an hour later then it said on the ticket, making a 13 hour train ride into a 14 hour train ride, with mom getting motion sickness. Finally we arrived at the shenzhen train station, which is located at the border between china and hong kong. Off the train, we walked about 15 minutes, following the signs saying 'hong kong'. Then we were met with line up after line up. The passing out of china line ...