Saturday, August 30, 2008

Wandering around China

I'm here on a tourist visa that says I can only be in the country for 60 days at a time, so we planned a trip to the northeast, thinking we would hop over the border into Russia or bib over to South Korea. (North Korea is a whole lot closer, but a little harder to get a border stamp.) But after we had bought plane tickets and told people we were coming, we realized that Russian visas can only be obtained in your home country, and the plane/boat to Korea is more expensive than the plane/train to Hong Kong, so we took a few days in Hong Kong first. One country, two systems, but it still counts as exiting the country.
We got there on the last day of a typhoon, so it rained a lot the first day, but was really clear after. We spent one night in Kowloon, one night at a hostel an hour's walk from the road along the sea, and after going back to the main island to get a clear view from the top, we went back across the border just before midnight, during the opening ceremony of the olympics.
Our plane back from Shenzhen was delayed, so we only had 5 hours back in Jinhua before starting off again. We visited Angie's friends and family in Dalian, Dandong, Changchun and Yanji, before returning home.

The photo albums are in picasa instead of the usual flickr. Let me know how well that works.