Travel Tips
As I mentioned in my previous post, I haven’t been a very good blogger lately. One of the reasons is that we don’t have the internet at home so I am left to my lunch break or odd moments at work to blog! But an even more exciting reason is that I went to Hong Kong for vacation! Check out my previous post for some pictures!
As a part of that post I asked what you wanted to know about my traveling, and so I’ve broken it down into your questions, and added a few more tips! If you want more tips, check out my previous post on traveling.
How do I choose accommodations? This varies depending on where we’re going. Peter and I like to take one "exotic" international trip each year if we’re able. While we’re brainstorming this, we usually consider who we know in other countries (we have a lot of friends all over the world!), and then narrow it down to a general list of countries. Once we’ve done that we debate on where we’d like to go based on cost (we price out the flights on websites), and then the topic of accommodations comes up! Of course, if we go to somewhere that we know someone, it’s much cheaper. This worked out when we were in Europe in 2002, 2005 and 2007. In 2002 and 2007 we stayed with friends. In 2005 we did half and half. We stayed with people we "knew" (either directly or through others) in Belgium and Holland. In the case of Hong Kong, we didn’t know anyone well enough to stay with them. Because we were going with my parents, they have timeshares with Disney and so we were able to use their timeshare to stay at Disney’s resort, which meant that we didn’t have to pay for our accommodations!
How do we plan our sightseeing? Once we know where we’re going we like to make a list of all the major sites. We do this by googling the city and checking out some travel websites. Wikitravel is useful in telling us what’s a good hilight. Then we try to make a list of the important ones that we care about. Sometimes I’ve even gone to bookstores and bought a book that tells me about the country or city and I use their day-by-day guide to recognize how long it will take to accomplish everything. Libraries are awesome for this because you can sign out books for a lot longer and then you can just return it and you’re not bound to it if it’s no good!
Biggest difference between North America and China? There is no cut and dry answer to this. I was in Hong Kong, and it’s an amazing city. In most senses it’s far more advanced, cultural and interesting than any of the major North American cities I’ve been to (and I’ve been to most!!!). It was exceptionally clean, their transit system was amazing, and the people were friendly and helpful. I liked how they infused their older culture with the modernity of everything. I did see a difference though when I went to mainland China for a day. It wasn’t as "polished" and things were still getting updated from when things changed a while back. I think I may have experienced more culture shock had I been to a small place in mainland China, but for the mostpart there was zero culture shock. We loved eating the local food, but there was tons and tons of other places to eat if that wasn’t your idea of fun!
Here are some other helpful sites for planning your trip:
Ryan Air - amazingly CHEAP airfare for flying between European countries. We used them to fly from London to Marrakech, and London to Belfast, and Dublin to London. Check out their policy on luggage! It’s never been an issue for us, but it might be for you. And also, you don’t get assigned seats. You’re guaranteed one, but you have to line up and rush to get on the plane to get seats together if you care!
Trek Escapes - we used this travel agency to book a really great tour with Gecko Tours when we went to Morocco. They were excellent, and we were very happy with their services.
Any other questions?? If so, leave them in the comment section and I’d be glad to do another post to answer them!
Where are we going next? Our sights are set on India…but no plans are made as of yet. I’ll keep you posted!