Last night I went to the infamous Snack Street in the heart of Beijing and ate a variety of interesting "foods" which included: sheep testicles, sheep penis, silk worm larvae, giant centipede and snake, which we later saw offered at another stand and concluded that what we ate was actually octopus. Each item was on a skewer which was fired to order by vendors who yelled out things like "penis, penis" at you as you passed by. The balls weren'...

We've spent the past few days going to the typical Beijing tourist attractions such as Tian'an men Square (the site of an enormous massacre of student's protesting for human rights in 1989, killing as many as 20,000 students, though reported by the Chinese government as 30), the Forbidden City (the imperial city built in 1406 where only royalty and unix (hired guards who's gentials were removed to prevent the royal line from being tainted) were allowed, the Summe...

After spending five months living/workng/falling in love with San Francisco, I've found myself once again on the other side of the world with Beth, this time in China. We spent one night in Seoul, South Korea visiting a friend of Beth's, before arriving here in Beijing. We have one month to spend here, and keeping true to our traveling fashion, have little to no plan. We're curretly staying with a family that we know through some complicated ties (Beth's ortho...

My oh my… how differently my summer has gone from what I had imagined.After suffering through three miserable months of working in a small, republican/military Texan town full of mostly obese Christians, I set off on what I thought would be a three-plus month long trip traveling the U.S. in a camper van (aka Helen) with Beth and my cool hippie friend Karla, who planned to join us for a few weeks at the beginning of the trip.Within the first few miles of the tri...

Well, we made it to Manta to discover that it was not a ¨small town with only one ATM,¨ at all (as we had been informed by the mom and daughter that had given us the $8), but was actually a large industrial-looking (aka: dirty) port city with several working ATM´s.Although I'm sure it had more to offer than the dangerous and dirty area surrounding the bus station, we decided not to venture out in the dark and stayed in the area in order to catch th...