Ok Go
Oh oh oh....here's a damn cool video which Jason has just introduced me to from a band called 'Ok go' utterly wicked! Oh and I'm back in Singapore now...I ll try to post more updates when I get my new laptop

Guiling Shan Shui ...something something...Tian Xia
(Guiling's scenery preceeds all under heaven)
I've been in Guiling for a day now and wow I am impressed, I was ferried around by Mr Guo and brought to many places which would be difficult if I had done it alone.

Limestone caves, ancient palaces, Liu San Jie's Show, Ancient Town and my favourite location was the mountains which I spent nearly 3 hours trekking in... It was beautiful to see the maple trees from the rope bridge...The scenery is indeed breath-taking and unbelivable but I was not able to see the scenery in Yangshou (the place where most of Guiling's scenic pictures are from)

To cover most of the sights in Guiling requires at least 6 days, so I guess I ll be back again next year. and with more people...

I'm now killing some time at the internet cafe as I am leaving at 5pm and I ll be on a 13hr long bus ride heading to Guangzhou....I just know that Im going to die on this trip...urg...Well I'm gonna bye some food and water for the trip now...

Hopefully I can find really good 'replica' items in guangzhou...see you guys in 3 days

Zhong Guo Hao! Zhong Guo Hao!

I'm now at an internet cafe along ChaoYang Road in Nanning, GuangXi, China....The bus ride yesterday lasted almost 9 hours but its well worth the butt pains and slightly ruptured bladder. IM NOW IN CHINA WOO HOO!

Booked into the Chao Yang Hotel and paid 38rmb (sgd$8) yeah im pretty cheap...its just a bed tv and fan with beraly enough room for my bags, but its cool..oh and shared toilets....

I went down to Bao Lian's resturant and had dinner with them and she's pregnant! Wow just 2 weeks...its the funniest thing, everytime I visit her something happens, first I find out that she's getting married, then now she's pregnant, then the next time Im here I guess I ll see her with her baby...hahaha

Well Ive booked my ticket to Guiling tomorrow, I heard that they usually rip people off there...I pray that I'll be able to survive the trip.... Ok then I ll post updates soon

The Magic Flute

This was of the Magic Flute opera Sara and I went to...It was quite a while back...anyways...It's Mozart's 300 or 400th birthday and so the entire city of Hanoi was celebrating it with many concerts and operas by the dead dude...

Well this being my first opera, I was pretty excited and I was all dressed up with my shirt and tie...Sara was reluctant to dress up because she knew that the Vietnamese who went to the opera would wear shorts and t-shirts...But she dressed up anyways...

The opera house was beautiful...but cramped... very very vietnamese

They even had a little screen on the yop right, with vietnamese subtitles coz the opera was in German...and the dialogue was in Vietnamese

Little Shop of Horrors!!!

Well anyways, the opera was good however the costumes.....cripes!!! S&M leather clad women with spears and golden spiral breast guards, a man in a green-dyed chicken suit, paper mache animal head wearing people in tights ( the actors had to hold on the the head while they moved around coz they were too big and would fall of if they had not done so) Argon (from LOTR), 3 mozarts in a hot air balloon, and a whole bunch of cult like people...rather disturbing.... but very vietnamese....I LOVE Vietnam!!!

Vietnamese Rock!!!
I was invited to a Vietnamese Rock concert...knowing that I would be totally clueless of what was going to happen, I invited Naomi to join me... I wasn't going to go through this alone...It was the final concert of (maybe the only rock band in Vietnam) The HURs, and the concert was called the 'Last Saturday' tickets at 50,000dong (sg$5.00)

It was an interesting day as I had to travel through most of Hanoi to find an extra concert ticket...my search finally led me to the Giang Vo exhibition centre where the concert was taking place that same evening... Not speaking any vietnamese, I had managed to tell the security guard that I wanted tickets and he gestured for me to go around the compound....strangely enough I ended up at the stage area of the concert...then I saw a couple of vietnamese and I approached them to find out where I could get tickets... amazingly one of them was the organiser and said to me that he could sell me the ticket on the spot...he then whipped out a ticket from his inner coat jacket and that was the end of my hunt...Cool eh...

So we met My (mi) and her Brother outside the lakeside hotel and walked to the concert and wow...it was totally mad....The streets were jammed with people and motorbikes and I was honestly afraid...

And so it begins
As we were making our way towards the concert area, the jam had already begun...Thousands of people were squeezing, pushing and shoving their way so that they could gain entry into the show. Believe me...it was a potentially dangerous stampeed situation... People were pushing, policemen were barraccading, women were screaming....what a rush....After I managed to get through the gate...it was all peaceful....everyone slowly walked towards the stage and it made me wonder...what was all the pushing about anyways?

So when the music began, we could feel the earth beneath our feet shake..and WOW!!! that was scary! Naomi commented 'isn't concrete not suppose to move' I just shrugged my shoulders...

So after a few minutes of experienceing the 'man-made' earthquake...I was distracted by another sight....an idiot had taken off his jacket and lit it....and the idiot was swinging it round and round and I could see a couple of people being traumatised by it...and believe me so was I.....

Idiocy
Things that made me cringe...

1) People setting fire to their clothes and swinging it overhead
2) People setting fire to newspapers and swinging it overhead
3) People setting fire to tissue paper and swinging it overhead (what's with the fires?)
4) People throwing (filled) bottles of water into the air (which would land on a random person's head)
5) People taking off their clothes and walking about bare bodied dispite the very apparent cold winds.
6) The endless head-bobbing
7) The endless 'air-guitaring'
8) The endless running about and ramming into random people...What the Hell?

Can I borrow your hat?
It's normal for Vietnamese to come up to you to practise their english on you...especially so if youre blond haired blue eyed (or after they find out that you are an english teacher)... Naomi had this guy come up to her to borrow her hat because he wanted to sneak his friend in and later he wanted to know if she had a spare ticket which he could buy off her so that he could get his friend in... Well that was how he started the conversation which led to a 1/2 hour long conversation with her and well he knew pretty much everything about Naomi.....Sehr Interrestant...

The Fan
It was pretty nice to see that everyone was getting into the mood of the entire thing and there was even a guy who had drawn the lead singer's tattoo on his jacket... Speaking of which I have seen many guys who actually use liquid paper and permernant markers to customise their jackets...What the hell?...Still....Toi Yeu Viet Nam

All hail the king!
2 mondays ago it started to rain and it hasn't rained for quite a while...the clouds were huge and the lightning flashes were unbelivable. So in a normal Vietnamese fashion, i donned my lime green poncho, took off my shoes and put them in a plastic bag, rolled up my jeans till they were at my knees and off i went.

Then as I was riding through the rain, I noticed that the rain was exceptionally heavy and cold. I continued on my journey home and then it felt as if branches and pieces of tree kept falling on me...and after awhile it began to hurt quite badly I was actually yelling and feeling quite stupid...then I drove into knee deep rain water which was so cold that it hurt. Arriving home, I shivered as I went into the bathroom for a hot shower....

Its wasn't until the next day that I found out that I had driven through a hailstorm...WOW WEE!!! The hailstones were as large as golfballs it seems and several elderly people inthe outlaying areas were killed due to head injuries as they were not in sheltered areas during the storm...

Lets see what happens
Here's something my kids sent to me