Travel Life

Xiao Nian and The Chinese New Year The first year in China makes for a lot of questions that are sometimes hard or difficult to find the answers to. With the new year swiftly approaching, it is appropriate that guests in this country are accustomed or informed on the traditions and interesting practices that people revolve this month long holiday around. “ Xiao Nian ”, or “Small Year“ in English, is the week or so before the actually Lunar Calendar New Year. It is probably just as important and significant as the New Year itself in a way, this usually occurs in late January or early February. Firstly it is important to recognize that although China follows both the Lunar Calendar year and the Georgian Calendar year. The Lunar Calendar year is traditionally the Calendar year followed more closely due to its practicality in farming and the country’s crop production. The Lunar Calendar year follows the earth’s rotation around the sun where ad the Georgian Calendar is a Solar calendar...

Dunnville-X Leaving this afternoon? Waiting for something in the mail and we can't leave without it apparently. My Ma originally planned on doing this trip by plan with the whole family. She wanted our family to go visit our dear relatives who live in Austin Texas, I haven't seen them in five years and they are having their furst child's 3rd birthday, not to mention we still haven't met their kids, my cousins at all yet really.  I was down there five years ago with my parents for the wedding which was pretty fun to say the least. The last time we did the trip, we drove down to Nashville, then stayed in Austin for a day, after which we went to Fredericksburg just south of Austin for the two day wedding ceremony and reception. A grand time to say the least.  After the wedding my parents and I made our way to San Antonio where we learned about the Alamo and its heroes. We then headed through Louisiana to New Orleans where we stayed for a day-had fun in the night...

UPDATE: 2021/12/09 Its been awhile since I have seen a wild sea turtle, even longer while since the one in Dandong that kinda sparked this post. To be fair-I haven't seen the captured and prepped for sale sea turtle market, nor have I heard about it-recently I was in Huizhou and we discussed the Huidong Sea Turtle Base. It was said that a lot of people would turn sea turtles into soup..that musta be a bloody feast, cause sea turtles ain't small and I can't imagine a lot of folk interested in a tiny one. Then again-who knows. My wife, son and I were considering going there to see the research base and learn a bit about sea turtles-also hoping to see some up close...maybe on the beachor whatever. Although the base is interesting and actually has a sea turtle there at the base that they keep, my son is only 3 years old. Its more of a trip for someone who is actually planning on spending some time there learning about the turtles/is specifically in GD province for that particul...

If you have ever gotten drunk in China it was a first time of either Beer or Bei Jiu. When in Rome, or in this case...Beijing, right? If you haven't heard or researched it yet, you will be reading about in this article about the chances and drawbacks to the formaldehyde content of Chinese beers in China. Many foreign beers (foreign to the west) don't make it to the west for a number of reasons, and formaldehyde content is one of them. In the past formaldehyde was used in beer to fasten the the filtration of impurities. It also turns out that allegedly formaldehyde appears naturally in the brewing process when methanol is involved. Basically, when methanol is metabolized it creates a very tiny amount of formaldehyde as a byproduct. This means there are a possible 2 sources of the formaldehyde in beer, one is intentional and the other is inevitable. The intentional use CAN be eliminated however companies were trying to make a buck or two, I am not sure what the current situat...

The idea of this travel bingo is not so much to create inside running jokes as it is to be as social as possible and meet as many people as possible when on the road. Hostels are by far the easiest places to meet people; hotels being a little more difficult and well...other than that, I don't know where else you would meet would aside from walking around and what not. The purpose of this game is to try and. Connect as many pictures of yourself with people from other countries as possible. Not that a person can have 100 photos of them with Germans, but they need to try and get a picture with a German, an English fella and so on and so forth. Who is playing? This Can be with people you just meet; people in your travel group and or even friends elsewhere travelling. Wicked cool little game, think it's a hundred percent worth it. All the best fellow travellers! Keep safe and stay adventurous, check out my blog and don't forget to say hello! -CB

Hanoi Gate is the “hostel” we stayed at. There were not many cheap reasonable selections left and this was the most promising for the price all of us agreed on. We were beginning to feel the financial squeeze this far into the trip, certainly surpassing a reasonable budget by all means. After experiencing this trip though, it was all worth it, especially Hanoi. There were places on the trip that had me shaking my head and others that brought a legitimate peace of mind to light, but Hanoi was certainly the cherry atop the crazy flavoured cake. Hanoi was not just a hub, it was a party hub, a historical hub an architectural hub, it had everything. Some of Mandarin I knew was even useful in small shops. We tried more wonderful coffees, beers, and foods (including jellyfish salad). We tried staying hydrated and “healthy” with fresh fruit smoothies created before your eyes in the homes/business that littered sidewalks.             We s...

Sunrise appeared as though someone just turned the lights on, clouds cleared out and the sun began to glisten on the beach’s water before us. Pretty amazing to just have a warm yet crisp morning, sparkling beach water before you and just silence aside from the odd gull call. After waiting for his cab to pick us up, we were beginning to get excited for the resort. He had mentioned it was secluded but we were so far from a real town that the ATM close to the resort only had money in it every couple weeks and well, it meant we got to take a trip into to town every so often. Jungle Beach was an amazing 4 days, everything from the food to the nearby hiking. Syl can’t offer a whole bunch of activities but he does like company and very much enjoys hearing about folks talk about how much they enjoy their time there as well what nearby things they may have discovered while wandering around. For instance, the waterfalls he told us to check out were maybe a 5 minute or less walk up from the re...