My Sabbatical

Source: eviltomthai at flickr

It’s hard to call any city in China “the ancient city of” since most of them have been around for thousands of years. One city I will be going to is called Xi’an – which has more than 3,100 years of recorded history! Canada was formed as a country a mere 150 years ago, and North America was only discovered 500 years ago. (Thanks Chris!) I am fascinated by history, and China has a lot of it.

Of course, the most famous place just outside of Xi’an is the Terracotta Warriors (also called Terracotta Army) that were discovered buried in a farmer’s field only 35 years ago. These warriors date from around 300 BC! There are an estimated 8,000 statues buried, including men, and even horses. It is part of the mausoleum built for the First Emperor of China, and they say 700,000 workers worked on the site. By the Emperor’s command, every statue is made to look different.

The funny thing is, a small part of the Terracotta Army (20 soldiers) is currently on display at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) which is within walking distance of my apartment in Toronto. I could have saved $2,475 if I just bought a museum ticket to that instead of flying all this way!

I originally had 4 nights booked here, but a friend told me 2 would be enough. The same friend told me Shanghai was one of her favorite cities in the world, so that convinced me to change my plans. Luckily the plans were changeable (not easily, but it only cost me $13 in the end). So now I have 3 nights in Xi’an and I leave first thing on the fourth day to head to Shanghai.

I am staying in a really nice hotel. It may be my best hotel of the trip. If the town of Xi’an doesn’t have much to offer, perhaps I can swim in the hotel pool, and make use of the spa services? I don’t think I will at all be bored. No worries about that.

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I sit here, 4 hours in to my 15.5 hour flight to Beijing, and I am thankful the seats have power adapters. I just bought an MSI Wind Netbook – yes, I hear netbooks are dead – and I noticed yesterday it gets a whopping 2 hours of battery life. Thank god for in-seat power adapters. 

I am excited to get started my two week trip to China. Excited and a bit scared. I am travelling alone, and don’t speak that much Mandarin Chinese. Even the words I can speak I am highly doubtful I am pronouncing correct. I am well aware that Chinese has tones and inflections that change the meanings of words, so Ni Hao coming from my mouth might come out as a deep insult to the hotel receptionist’s ancestors. 

As I type this, my plane seems to be entering the air space over Greenland. Now to some of you, you might think, he’s flying from Toronto to Beijing, East to West, what the heck is he doing over Greenland? And I might have asked myself the same question except I did some reading recently about how imperfect it is to translate a 3D spherical map of the globe onto a 2D surface. So technically, the fight from Toronto to Beijing goes over the North Pole, and technically Greenland is lying lengthwise above Canada and not beside it as most Mercator maps represent. Also, Greenland is a LOT smaller in reality than most maps depict in true relative scale. I’ve seen maps that show Greenland as big as all of Canada. 

The Real Greenland - Above Canada

Researching hotels for China was fun. I probably did more research on them than anything else, because there are so many different varieties to choose from with different price ranges. The hotel I found in Beijing is very interesting. It gets good reviews on TripAdvisor (top 50 in Beijing), it’s cheap ($50 a night for the cheapest rooms), it’s close to many attractions (steps from the Forbidden City), has Internet access, and the staff reportedly speak English and are helpful. They say taxi drivers have trouble finding it, but I brought with me a map in Chinese. 

I have 4 nights in Beijing. I will visit the Forbidden City, the Great Wall of China, Tiananmen Square, Mao’s Tomb, do some shopping in a couple of the famous markets (clothes and DVDs!), visit the famous night “snack market” where scorpions on a stick can be had (I will stick to meat), and perhaps do a tour that will take me to the site of the Olympic Games. Since Beijing is the capital, I am sure there are lots of very old and/or very interesting things to do there. 

I also just need to get oriented with being in China. How to get around, what food to eat, some basic words and phrases, and other beginner tasks. You just don’t know what you don’t know sometimes. 

I am tempted to hire a personal tour guide for a day. I saw a taxi driver who will drive you around for 500 Yuan a day, which is $75. Having an English speaking taxi driver for a whole day might totally be worth it. I will play it by ear when I get there. 

That’s all for now. I’ll have more to say about China when I’m there!

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Source: Omar A at flickr

This is a new experience for me. I have a couple of weeks vacation from work coming up at the end of July, and somehow I convinced myself I need to visit China. So I booked myself a plane ticket to Shanghai this past Thursday. No hotel, no idea what I’m going to do there. But I’m sure there must be interesting things. This has got to be the most disorganized trip I have ever booked.

It’s a bit scary to be quite honest and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because I don’t speak a word of Mandarin Chinese. Usually if I go to a country that doesn’t speak English, I can “get by”. I can talk to people, order food, deal with taxis, read some signs. It doesn’t matter the European language - French, Italian, Spanish… even Greek. I can look at a Greek sign and make out the word Airport or make out the word for Acropolis, and I know I’ll be alright. I can look at a word, and it might sound terrible, but I can pronounce it and teach myself the language in a shorter time.

But Chinese is not a phonetic language in it’s written form. But a friend who once lived in China suggests I get the name of my hotel written in Mandarin before I go, because taxi drivers don’t speak English! That’s tough to comprehend, because in most countries it’s the taxi drivers who DO speak English. I am expecting to get really, really lost at some point. (Not sure if that’s a bad thing or a good thing. Getting lost can be fun!)

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Source: ToastyKen at flickr

For many years, I have been fascinated with the concept of Round the World (RTW) travel. There are many different ways to do that, and one of the most interesting for me is a “Round the World Plane Ticket”.

That is just as it sounds. For one fixed price, you get to plot a course around the world, across several continents, and have up to one year to take that trip of a lifetime. There used to be a couple of airline groups offering this, but from what I hear, the only one that now does is OneWorld with their OneWorld Explorer and Global Explorer programs.

In the old days, it used to work geographically in that you could book any number of plane tickets as long as they were all going in the same direction (east or west). I used to dream of taking 100 small flights to make my way across Asia and Europe.

Well I guess the airlines caught on to my evil plan, and the updated rules put an upper limit on the number of total flights at 16. But backtracking is now allowed in a limited fashion. Basically, you have to make your way around the world and can only cross the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans once each.

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Source: Rodrigo_Soldon at flickr

OK, let’s enter the world of fantasy for a brief moment. Let’s say you had quite a bit of money saved from many years of working, and wanted to embark on the most epic of all journeys – visiting every country in the world on one trip. Could it be done? Is it even remotely possible?

You might briefly think “yes”. After all, you could take a swing through North and South America in one big go – those countries are lined up in a row for the most part. And heading through Europe doesn’t seem so difficult. People do that all the time. So what does that leave? Asia and Africa? Seems entirely doable.

But what if I told you the current world record for visiting every country was 6 years, 10 months and 7 days? And that wasn’t all on one trip. If you could visit every country like that, you’d be the first to ever do so.

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Source: bobjagendorf @ flickr

I still have this idea in my head that, with Portugal, Spain and Greece in some trouble, that now would be a good time to live there for a bit, or just visit.

But then the idea struck me – maybe it’s not a good time for that.

Sure, prices are going to be cheaper as the Euro has dropped like a stone this past year. And businesses will cut prices to attract customers, and on a purely financial basis, this might be a good time for that.

But stores and restaurants are closing. Some in the centers of town, and tourist areas. Greece’s main shopping district has empty storefronts, where there used to be none.

The people are unhappy. Let’s put the riots and violence aside, unhappy citizens mean strikes. The mood in town will be more somber. The care-free, let’s take the afternoon off every single day, Europe that I love will be just a little bit quieter, more serious, more desperate. Beggars on the streets, which are usually just a handful of gypsies, will increase.

Spain’s unemployment has gone up to 21%. Think about that. More than one-fifth of the population does not have a job. Almost every family has a parent or a sibling who is out of work. That reminds me of a story I heard in Barbados about when the unemployment rate was above 20% for a time there – crime increased, and particularly crimes again tourists. And then tourism plumetted.

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Source: jonrawlinson at flickr

Iceland’s economy was the first to fall. All three of the country’s banks collapsed, and the stock market fell 96% from it’s high in a matter of days.

Greece is grabbing headlines now for its financial problems, needing a record $150 billion bailout from other European governments and the IMF. Greece currently has an annual government deficit of 13% of GDP, meaning the government has to borrow one-eighth of the size of their entire economy this year. There’s a very interesting article on how it all started.

And those might only be the first two European countries to be in trouble. Ireland’s deficit is 14% of GDP, and economists are worried that it could be next. Spain has had troubles for years (mostly relating to its real estate collapse) and is running an 11% deficit. Portugal is also under the microscope with 9% deficit. Besides the level of government spending, these countries have high unemployment rates, increasing debt service obligations, and falling credit worthiness making it more difficult for their governments to borrow.

I don’t mean to make light of their problems, and the long term solutions to the world’s financial crisis aren’t clear. But the thought did occur to me…

I wonder if this is a good time to move to Greece? Or Spain?

The Euro is actually at a historic low against the Canadian dollar – and has fallen 15% in the past year. (The US to Euro exchange has been about break even in the past year although very volatile, given America’s deep financial crisis as well.) But against Canada, Australia, India, Indonesia, Sweden, and  other countries that have not had as deep an economic crisis, the Euro is 10% down from year ago levels.

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