Awesome Layover #1 – 12 Hours in Shanghai

“Awesome, I have a long layover!” Let’s face it, those are words that are rarely uttered by anyone. Travelers either want to get to their destination or return home as soon as possible. I too prefer direct flights to lower my chances of having any missed connections, unexpected delays, or boring stays in the airport, but don’t scoff at a layover so quickly. It is a golden opportunity to visit a place that you weren’t expecting. These days, I think of layovers as a bonus travel destination. It is kind of like a trip within a trip. On some occasions, like my layover in Amsterdam, I have even gone out of my way to ensure that I have a longer stay to properly explore the layover city. This is the first of what I hope are many posts about layovers I have had on the way to my main destination. This is what I did on my layover in Shanghai.
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Five Things I (and Probably You) Forget To Bring on a Trip

If you are like me, you probably have a master list to cross reference the things you should bring on a trip. For whatever reason, no matter how many of these lists I have, I always seem to forget something. To be honest, I have never forgotten anything important like my passport, my wallet, or money. Nevertheless, these are five things that would definitely come in handy if you remember to bring on your trip:

 

5) Earplugs

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Half a year with a blog, whoooohoooo! While I told myself that this wasn’t just a short term hobby, deep down, I don’t know if I believed in myself. After all, I have started a bunch of stuff (piano, journals, scrapbooks, photo albums) only to quit when my heart really wasn’t that into it. Like before, this is a non-fancy (no pictures) update about what it going on with Travel World Heritage.

1) Kingdom Animals is on hold. I tried to spin off a nature based photo blog to show off my animal photography. I figured that it would be easy because all I had to do was post a picture and write a sentence or two. With considerations to SEO, photo watermarking and re-sizing, uploading, choosing the right picture in the first place, etc, it proved to be too much work. I want to focus on this site first and foremost, so for now, it will remain on hold.

2) We are now one of the top 200,000 websites in the world! Read more

Travel Tales #2 – Getting Scammed in Beijing

Traveling takes effort… it really does. What is worse, it is terrifying. Unfortunately, much like everything else in life, it is the bad memories that stick around the longest. Much like anything else in our digital lives, people post about the good parts, and we don’t often hear about what went wrong. However entertaining it may be, traveling can be scary enough without having to read about horror stories online. When I finally get around to write a post about Angkor Wat, I will be sure to skip the part where I got diabolical diarrhea for two weeks after leaving Cambodia.
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Top Five Things I Hate About Korea

After I wrote the list of the Five things I Love about Korea, I alluded that a ‘hate’ list was coming soon. Well here it is….TA-DA! After having lived in this wonderful country for so long, I realize that there are lots of things to love. However, no place is perfect and with that comes a number of things that annoy me. Maybe hate was too strong a word, but I got your attention didn’t I? Here are the things I hate about Korea.

Useless Loosely Related Fact: Allusions are one of my favorite literary devices.

and here we go!

5) You Can’t See the Stars!

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