Shanghai Metro

My new apartment isn't very close to the city centre. In fact, it is 17 KMs away from People's Square.


This isn't a huge deal because Shanghai's transit system is awesome. I am thinking specifically of the metro system as I have never used a public bus.

Finding an Apartment

When someone new moves to Shanghai, so the debate begins on where to live. Should they live in the Pudong area of the city or should they live in the Puxi area?

Puxi is the more happening area, where the downtown is, and where a lot of the restaurants and night clubs are. Pudong is known more for having actual houses, with plenty of parks and more of a family friendly area.

This was also my first lesson in Chinese. Dong means east and xi (she) means west. Pu is the name of the big river that dissects the city. So Puxi is west of the river while Pudong is east of it.

Hello From China!

I have been absolutely awful at keeping this blog up to date.

I have done a lot of traveling since I last updated this blog on my adventures...and I am not planning on slowing down the travel anytime soon. Since my last travel post, I have been to Dubai, Vietnam, Bali, Shanghai and Hong Kong. I even spent a year dormant in Canada.

That means I have a lot of work to do in order to update this blog.

As a second grade teacher I am constantly encouraging my students to keep practicing in order to achieve better results and improve. As an aspiring writer, it is time to take my own advice.

I'm trying to decide what exactly this means. I think I should be writing daily in order to keep my writing skills sharp. I can keep myself accountable for that by promising and following through with a weekly article for this blog.

Next Adventure!

I have been terrible at keeping up with this blog, and I intend to change that!

The last post I made was about my time in Oman. That was back in October of 2012! A year and a half ago. Since then I have travelled to Dubai, Vietnam and Bali.

While I have not done anything worth writing about in the last year of my life (at least that fits the theme of this blog) I still have not caught up on everything I have done. Vietnam in particular was a long 2 week trip that was packed full of adventure, including a food tasting tour that would shock those of you who know me and are familiar with my food tastes (or lack there of).

Will I ever catch up on these travels? If there was ever a time to catch up on them it would have been in the 8 months while I was being a couch potato and becoming addicted to netflix.

Now, I am presented with a new adventure. One that takes me to one of the most populated cities in the world; Shanghai.

Here I will teach a grade 2 class while exploring what China has to offer. The adventure starts on August 5th and I can't wait! I'll be pretty busy between now and then with friend's weddings, bachelor parties and birthdays. Once I arrive in Shanghai, there may be too many new and exciting things to write about to ever catch up on what I could have been writing the last 8 months.

I'll try my best. Back to East Asia I shall go!

Nizwa

The man who took us to and from the snorkeling was very nice. His name was Mohammad and he was Omani. He asked what else we were planning to do, and if we had paid for any of it yet. We had not. We wanted to see the mountains, visit Nizwa and visit a Wadi. We had arranged day trips for some of it through the hotel, but had not yet paid for it.

Mohammad offered to do all of the things we wanted to do for quite a bit cheaper. He also acted as our cab driver, driving us from the hotel to the beach and suggesting restaurants along the way and he did not charge us anything for this service.

The first trip we did was to a fort at the base of the Hajar Mountains. The Nizwa fort used to be an important link between Muscat and the rest of the country.

The fort itself looks like what people who have never been to the Middle East would expect it to look like, myself included.


 Mohammad took us up through the mountains along the way. Quite nice for those in the Middle East and those stuck in the boring desert that is Kuwait. But nothing you can't see in the rest of the world.






This is the top of the fort.

This is the view at the rest of the fort from above.

Snorkeling in the Oman Gulf

After settling into the Safeer International Hotel I talked to the receptionist to find out different tour groups the hotel recommended for day trips. I already had a couple things in mind, but was having trouble trying took book beforehand online. I figured the hotel would be able to accommodate my needs, and they were. They had a flyer with different things that we could do.

One of these things was snorkeling, which was something I wanted to do. I also want to try diving, but currently am not certified to do so.

Before I moved to Australia in 2009 I purchased a camera that you can use underwater with snorkeling in mind. When I went to the Great Barrier Reef, I was with my parents and my Dad didn't want to go snorkeling. We instead went on a glass bottom boat, which ended up being okay.

This time was different. Sure, the coral reef wasn't nearly as big as the natural wonder of the world, but I had nothing from holding me back snorkeling and using my no longer new under water camera.

The trip included dolphin watching, something I did while in Sri Lanka. It was cool, and there was a dolphin doing a lot of showing off. It would jump in the air and do a back flip. It did it several times. I don't have any good pictures of it, but I was amused regardless.

After what seemed like too long watching the dolphins, the boat took off to a remote place near a private beach. The water was refreshing as it was a hot day on the boat at sea.

It was relaxing, just laying in the ocean staring through my goggles at all the active fish and seeing the colours the aquatic life had to offer. Descriptions don't do the marine world justice, and frankly, neither do the photos.

My favourite was the sea turtle I saw, just hanging out. It's shell pretty much blends right in with the coral. I didn't get a good full screen shot of the turtle, but I did get it's head and front legs with part of the shell.

Overall, it was a good start to my visit to Oman. The guy who drove us from the hotel to the marina and back was very nice. He offered to drive us to the places we wanted to go at a discounted rate. Since we had not paid for the other things the hotel had booked for us yet, we cancelled and decided to go with our new Omani friend, Mohammad.

Muscat

In October I traveled south to view another country in the Middle East: Oman.

The adventure started in the capital, Muscat and that was the base for my 6 day excursion. There are a lot of similarities between Oman and Kuwait, or specifically Muscat and Kuwait. They are both located on the Arabian Gulf and they both have wealth from vast amounts of oil. The climate is very similar and they are desert cities.

There are several differences however. Muscat is actually quite pretty, being surrounded by mountains. The size of Oman also impacts my overall impression as there are other things around instead of the what you see is what you get feel of Kuwait. Culturally Oman still has the warm Arab hospitality but I get the sense they work harder than their northern counter parts. This impression comes from seeing Omanis working in customer service. Kuwait imports ex-pats for those types of jobs.

Surprisingly, the population of Kuwait is larger than Oman despite the country being 17 times smaller. There are roughly the same amount of Kuwait nationals as Oman nationals however, the difference in population comes from the over 2 million (roughly 68%) workers from other countries in Kuwait compared to only about 600,000 in Oman.

Another difference between the two countries was the care. Kuwait does not have adequate garbage disposal and as a result it is common to find garbage all over the place. This was not the case in Oman, the streets were clean! Or, a lot cleaner than Kuwait. I don't think there were nearly as many stray cats running around either. I am sure the garbage problem in Kuwait has a lot to do with the larger population in the smaller area. Still, it is discouraging to see all the garbage in a country with the wealth that Kuwait is supposed to possess.



My first day in Muscat was spent relaxing and getting to know the area around my hotel. I had taken an early morning flight and had to wait for 2 hours or more to get through customs and buy my visa. After settling into the hotel I walked around the immediate area a bit and then went to visit the Muttrah Souq. A souq is a marketplace and this souq did not differ much from the souqs I have visited in Kuwait. It is located on the northern port of the city.