I had been in Asia for 5 months but I don’t think I really experienced culture shock until Nepal. I loved it there, but to be actually living in a place that is so different from what I’m used to for a month was an experience to say the least! Some of the major differences: …
One of the placements I did in Nepal was at an orphanage, the Buddhist Child Home in Kathmandu. Before we got there I wasn’t sure what to expect, I’d also been teaching at a school in Kathmandu but was more nervous stepping into the orphanage because there wasn’t a specific structure for what we should …
I had really wanted to volunteer for a long time but I’m sure I can’t be the only one who could only find ridiculously expensive programs. If I had $3000 to spend I would donate it rather than give it to a company that seems to make money taking advantage what I can only assume …
The flight to start the everest base camp trek is notoriously dangerous, mostly the flying in part as if there’s cloud cover pilots can, and often do, miss the runway and crash the plane. On our way out we were lucky enough to get 8 DAYS of fog & cloud cover meaning we were stuck …
Most people who think about Nepal only really associate it with Everest and the Himalayas, although the reason for our visit wasn’t trekking we couldn’t leave without being able to say we basked in the shadow of the worlds tallest mountain. Most people who do the trek to EBC take the easy route and fly …
On the way to Nepal we had a day-long stop over in Singapore, we could have made it only a few hours, but figured squeezing in another country for free wouldn’t do any harm. I’d already spent a few days in Singapore between my flights from Hong Kong and Vietnam but my travel buddy had …
It’s no mystery that karaoke is kind off a big deal in Asia, even though it’s usually associated with Japan (and Japanese business men singing their way through business dealings- or at least that’s the impression my business culture class would have us believe!) it’s taken hold in a majority of the continent. In our …
Flights in and around China are quite expensive especially if you’re traveling on a student budget and you don’t have a Chinese credit card (because then you can’t book from certain discount sites). Flying from Hong Kong is considered international so it’s often cheaper to take the train to Shenzhen and fly from there. We …
