Nathaniel and Sheree back in Australia

Procrastination!

It’s amazing how easy it is to stop
doing something (like posting to this blog) and once you’ve stopped
doing it guilt and fear stops you from starting again.

• Guilt because you feel that you
  should somehow compensate for failing.
• Fear because now that you have to
  catch up you’ll have to do double, triple, quadruple the amount of
  work just to catch up today let alone getting ahead.

So it’s been four months since my last
update so rather than writing a big long post I’m going to summarize
each month.

September

September was basically a boring month.
We were both back at work and nothing interesting really happened. I
spent a bit of time uploading and GeoTagging lots of the photos that
we have.

October

Israel and Ruth came over in October
before they went to Thailand to see my parents. I went down to Zibo
with them to see where Israel lived while he was in China. They took
me around to all their favourite places and just like Beijing half of
them didn’t exist any more (things change rapidly over here).

November

This was a really pivotal month at
work. We finally released the new website which was good and bad. We
were having lots of problems with the old site and the new site fixed
a lot of issues while introducing new issues. My manager also
finished his contract at Language Calls and decided to go back to
America.

December

Thailand! That just about sums it up
^_^

The beginning of the month was really
busy but it was worth it to go to Thailand for Christmas and see all
my Brothers. I don’t want to spend to much time writing about it here
because I’m going to write a full post about it later on but you can
check out the photos if you want to
http://picasaweb.google.com/adinobro/Christmas2007Thailand

January

It was really hard to go back to work
after Christmas. To make things worse I got sick for a week and then
depressed for a week. It wasn’t a good month for me. Things had
picked up by the end of the month and it finished on a good note
especially since my parent’s and Daniel were coming over for Chinese
New Year but I’ll write about that at the end of the month.

So that’s about it for this post. The
next post should be coming soon.

Hi,

We arrive back from Tibet at 8am and I went back to work straight away and I mean straight away. I had a spare change of cloths so I caught a taxi to work and got changed there after I had a shower (After living on a train for two days the shower felt like heaven). Sheree and her parents relaxed on Monday then went to the Great Wall and some of the markets on Tuesday on Wednesday. I took Thursday off work to go with them to Longqing gorge. In the morning we meet Cathy and Janny, her co-teacher. By the time we left it was about 9:00 so the traffic was horrible. On the way to Longqing gorge we picked up Janny’s children. We finally arrived at Longqing gorge at about 1:00pm so we had some lunch at a local restaurant. After we arrived at the gorge we went up the dragon escalator and took a boat ride up the gorge which was fantastic. When we arrived at the end of the gorge there were a number of shops with stuff for sale and a spot where you could go bungee jumping over the river. I deiced to take the plunge and while it’s not a much fun as sky diving it’s definitely an adrenaline buzz. Unfortunately we ran out of time so we were not able to take the chairlift to the top of the gorge. I guess that means we’ll have something to do if we come back another time.

One week after Sheree’s parents left we went on another Holiday. We went to Hong Kong first via Shengjin. Shengjin is about 2 hours away from Hong Kong but it is about $100 cheaper per flight to go to Shengjin because it is a domestic flight instead of an international flight. Sheree found a really nice hotel in Hong Kong called Mingle Place which is a tech hotel. You could use a finger scanner to get into your room and there was even a mini tv in the bathroom. After we settled into the hotel we went out for dinner and it became painfully obvious that we weren’t in Beijing anymore. In Beijing any meal over 100 RMB ($15) is really expensive. Well as we looked around for a place to eat the prices started at about 80 RMB and go up to 300+ RMB for dinner. We ended up having a reasonable priced dinner but it did make me thankful that we ended up in Beijing instead of Hong Kong.

The next day we caught up with Ron and went to Ocean Park which was a blast. I highly recommend checking out the photos that we took of the day. After Ocean Park we went down to the river to see the laser light show. Unfortunately it didn’t live up to expectations but the fireworks were nice. The next day we meet Wilson a the metro station. Wilson was a lived with my family for almost a month back in 1998 and my monther has been keeping in touch with him since then. I hadn’t seen him for almost 10 years so I was a bit worried that we wouldn’t recognize each other. Fortunately we found each other and then went to Jumbo Kingdom for lunch. We figured that a trip to Hong Kong without eating Dim Sum would be like going to Australia and not eating a meat pie, so we had lots of weird and interesting food for lunch. It was lots of fun catching up and finding out what Wilson had been up to over the last couple of years. After lunch we went shopping at a local market and basically killed time until it was late enough to go to The Peak. On the way to the markets we ran into Ronald McDonald. You wouldn’t believe how excited Sheree was. He was in a bit of a rush he but he was willing to stop and have his photo taken with Sheree which really made her day. After the markets we caught the tram up to The Peak which was an experience. The next day wasn’t anywhere near as much fun. We spent almost the whole day waiting in queues first at the visa office then at the book fair but in the end I got my visa and we both got some books in English The next day we left for Guilin.

We arrived at the airport at Guilin and were all excited about catching a river cruise down to Yangshuo but unfortunately it leaves at 8am unless you want to hire a private boat which wasn’t in our budget. We ended up catching a bus to Yangshuo and then catching a Taxi to the Outside Inn which was in a farming village just outside Yangshuo. We had a few problems on the first night with huntsman spiders but after that it settled down. Over the next couple of days we had the most fun we’ve even had in China. We went to the Water Caves which had mud baths and pools that you could swim in, we rode electric scooters, we climbed a mountain right next to the town, we went down rapids and relaxed on a river cruise. It was fantastic. We like it so much that we are going to try and organize another trip down there in the October holidays or the May holidays.

Eventually we had to leave Yangshuo and continue on our journey. Late Friday night we caught a plane to Shanghai where we stayed at a serviced apartment. The next day we explored Shanghai which didn’t end up taking that long. Maybe we were looking in the wrong places but apart from shopping there didn’t seem to be much to do in Shanghai. The prices were roughly the same as Beijing or slightly higher. The Oriental Pearl TV Tower was impressive but in the end Shanghai just felt like another big city. By the time we arrived in Beijing on Sunday afternoon we were well restarted and glade that we were living in Beijing instead of Hong Kong or Shanghai. We are already planning to go back to Yangshuo with some friends in the next twelve month.

I’m expecting August to be a fairly boring month so I’m going to try and make up for it by making a video of our first year of China. There will be a link to it in the next update. Until them feel free to check out the photos on our online gallery.

Till next month,

Nathaniel and Sheree Brown.