Kim vs. The World!

Feeling refreshed from our fancy flight, we arrived in Delhi and instantly loved India. It was like we thought we would experience - insanely hot, beggars/street vendors/people everywhere, the organized chaos of a country that is home to 1.2 billion people. Everyone we met was friendly and, praise to hundreds of years of British rule, spoke perfect English! India has all other developing countries that we've been to beat in the English department. Not only do even the street vendors and cleaners all speak it, but they love to use phrases like "feast your eyes" and "it's cold outside, come into my shop!" haha. There were also a few things we didn't expect. The thing that strikes you first, when you wander your first city street in India, is the stray cows. Yes, STRAY. They are everywhere... lying in the middle of the road, walking beside you near the shops, eating garbage near a food stall. The drivers on every street just swerve around them like they are...

We definitely saved the best for last on our trip. Beijing was lots of fun, despite the Chinese mayhem. We visited the beautiful Olympic Green. I was really cool to see it after watching all of the events on TV and working on the Olympics campaign at work. We also went to Tiananmen Square, and found that the Chinese government doesn't stop with just limiting internet useage ( facebook /my blog/you tube are all banned in China, and you have to use your passport details to log onto the internet !). The Chinese government basically denies that the student protest in the Square ever took place. There are police around everywhere listening to what people say. It is impossible to tell where the infamous tank photo was taken. It was really quite eerie to be in an environment like that! The Square was being decorated when we were there for the 60 th Anniversary of the DRC , and it looked to be quite a show. We also visited the beautiful Llam Temple and saw the monks in worship and a...

So, admittedly, in our first week of travel there, China hadn't exactly won our votes for our favourite travel destination thus far. However, the craziness of the Chinese people and the utter chaos in which they seem to each be floating around in, did start to feel more familiar and funny by week 2. We arrived in Xi'an, the great walled city, and set off to see it's major attraction: The Terracotta Warriors. This army of statues was uncovered in the 1970's and were all assembled to guard the tomb of the same dude who built the Great Wall. Not a bad resume, eh? The warriors were as impressive as I had hoped, with each one having a unique facial expression and outfit. There are estimated to be over 8000 warriors, although, to our surprise, a vast number of these have yet to be excavated. Also, the tomb of aforementioned impressive resume dude (I think his name was Emperor Quin?) was nearby, but apparently scientists still cannot figure out a way to open the tomb without d...

"May umbai sop die son Chin" - This is a line in one of the Khmer songs that the children taught us, and the only song that we know in entirety. We sang it, and did the hand gestures, with the kids every day for a month, ad nauseam . That line translates to "Butterfly flies to China". When we were leaving and the kids asked where we were going, we would repeat that line, saying instead "teachers fly to China". And fly to China we did... emotionally drained, a bit thinner than usual due to the all rice/soup diet, and with Mars feeling so sick with a cold that she didn't remember anything about the flight or the taxi to the hotel! We arrived in Shanghai very early in the morning, and were struck by how much the airport area looked like Toronto. As I wandered from our hotel to Nanjing Road (the main hub of Shanghai shopping and general business) I came upon a bunch of very old Chinese people doing Tai -chi on the shopping street, which was eerily quiet a...

Week 4 was upon us, and although some of the days we spent teaching felt like the longest of our lives, we couldn't believe we were almost done. Our time at the centre was brief by most standards, but we felt an overwhelming connection to the children and the staff there. We had learned all of their stories, and became a part of their daily lives, as they had become part of ours. This was evident when one of the security guards we hung out with the most, Rey, invited us to join him on a visit to his home village. This seemed like a good idea at the time, as did the bottles of wine we snuck into our apartment the night before. We turned up at the gates, a bit hungover, to find that we would be traveling to Rey's house on the smallest moto bike we had ever seen... and the trip would take 2 hours!! After our legs fell asleep and we stopped at the side of the road to drink "Bottled water"(which turned out to be tap water once we had a big long sip! Mars stopped drinking i...