Now that people’s summer schedules are dropping in, it’s time for me to decide where to go this summer. Except I’m having a tough time deciding where to go as it boils down to a handful of categories that include location and costs as factors.
1. The Revisit: After doing quite a bit of travel last year (a year ago today I was in Burma) I have a lot of places on my list to see again, visit and stay with good friends or places to explore more. In the order of most desire to return: Singapore, Hong Kong, Mainland China and The Philippines. Both Singapore and Hong Kong are small places that don’t necessarily require that much time, however, probably less than a week. Except the costs to getting down are not enough to validate the travel. I know I would have a good time, but I want to go somewhere new. However, I also want to check see some friends.
2. Virgin Territory: While I have seen a lot of SE Asia, East Asia is still largely untraveled for me. I have yet to go to Japan or Taiwan or visit Beijing longer than two days. Really, the bigger deterrent for me at this time for going to somewhere like Japan is, to be frank, the summer cost. Getting a flight into Japan during the summer will be expensive as will be the time in the country. On review, cost isn’t a deterrent for the fact that I know I could go to somewhere like Osaka on a long weekend during the school year via Jeju Air (Korea’s budget airline) and spend less.
3. The Adventure: This is secretly what I want to do, but I don’t really think I have the time to really make it worth my while. I really want to go to Mongolia or visit Asian Russia. With only about 10 to 11 days off for the summer and a helluva distance to travel, I’m not so sure if it’s worth the effort to attempt to see so much in that amount of time. Unlike traveling to SE Asia or East Asia, I will spend almost zero time in the cities if I go to Russia or Mongolia. That means long transit times and spending a lot of time in wide-open spaces.
Before I get to updating more pictures and more minutia on traveling out of a backpack, I thought it would be good to cover the media/TV saturation in Korea. Getting away from audio-video stimuli in Korea is near-impossible. With a few number of corporately-manufactured artists (like Girl’s Generation) penetrating the musical consciousness, anyone in Korea longer than a month will learn a crappy pop song by a sort of osmosis.
While I think the corporate pop scene in Korea is a bit insidious, the media that scares me in a different way is the proliferation of DMB, or Digital Multimedia Broadcasting. This technology allows a relatively high-quality …Click to Continue Reading or Comment »
Well, I did it, I finished my Flickr updates. I am now completely updated on my photos. That means I can start to blog about normal things instead of Flickr.
All my photos from Southeast Asia, Tijuana, Concerts, California and South Korea have all been updated, tagged and put online.
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So I just added the new “Like” button to my site. That is, if you didn’t notice it above. So, when you “Like” a blog post of mine, it will show up on your newsfeed like this:
That way you can show your friends how much you love my blog posts, photos, etc.
Test it out for me, please!
OR: You can click the “Share” button with the “+” icon to share my blog posts with Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, etc.
I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on Flickr this week when I have down time between classes. I’ve managed to update several photos from last year’s journeys around Southeast Asia. They include life around Singapore, Malaysian Borneo (Sarawak), Cambodia and Java, Indonesia.
Thailand, Laos, Myanmar, The Philippines, Macau, Hong Kong, San Diego, Tijuana, Korea to come in the next week or two.
Photos after the jump:
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Because I’m taking my sweet time to upload about 400 photos to my Flickr account, I feel like photos of my current living situation should not also take an inordinate amount of time. Luckily, I just installed a new plug-in for WordPress called FB Photo Fetchter, which lets WordPress access my Facebook albums and post them directly into my blog for those don’t have an account/life.
You can view the 100 or so photos after the jump ->
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