Creepy Crawlies at the China-Burma Border

During my seven and a half weeks at the office, I couldn't really go anywhere. I mean, I could walk upstairs, downstairs, and maybe 100 metres in any direction outside the compound. Other than that, I stayed within the compound, relaxing in my room on the roof or playing ping pong in the courtyard when I wasn't working in the office or leading English conversation classes in the meeting room. As a result, it wasn't always easy finding subjects to photograph. Luckily for me, there are tonnes of insects and other creepy crawlies in this area so I had something to occupy some of my spare time. I'm not a huge bug fan, but some of these guys were pretty interesting:








This leaf bug didn't seem to realise that he doesn't blend in so well on my friend's plaid shirt...




Nor is he inconspicuous on a shiny window surface:






There are thousands and thousands of beetles in the border area around Nabang/Laiza. We often found really big ones lying on their backs, some alive, others dead like this one:




I noticed something in this photo only long after I had taken it - If you can see what I'm talking about, first correct comment wins a free beer when we're in the same city:




A few minutes later, the dragonfly decided my friend made a better rest stop than the wall:




There are also many mantises, some green and some brown, and of many different sizes, in the area:




Leave the lights on in the office at night, and along with all the other crazy critters that turn up at the windows, you might find one of these huge moths. He's about 5 inches across from wingtip to wingtip:




One of my past hobbies, for which sadly I rarely find time these days, is lockpicking. I was, therefore, surprised and impressed to find a mantis trying to pick the lock to my bedroom door when I woke up on the morning of April 30th!




These guys seem to stay put for many hours at a time. After about 4 hours on my door, he spent the rest of the day on the ground just outside my door:




While playing ping pong outside one day, I saw something strange and a little colourful walking on an upside-down garbage bin, so I quickly took a photo and on zooming in, this is what I saw:




This guy is unfortunately dead, but the lady who sweeps up the dead bugs every morning hasn't yet come this way. He's really bright and colourful! Not sure why we find so many dead bugs every morning - they fly around the lights all night then drop dead, I guess maybe from hunger or using up all their energy? I never thought much about it...




Later the same day I was about to play some night ping pong with a friend when we noticed we had a friend waiting for us on the net. My friend caught him (which wasn't hard, considering the critter didn't try to get away) to fry and eat later, but then he didn't want to hold onto the bug while playing ping pong and had nowhere to store it so he let it go. Around this area, these bugs are well-liked as a snack.




After our night ping pong was over, my friend and I went to the office to check our email, and from a distance out of the corner of my left eye I caught a dark flash of something moving under a desk. I headed over and snapped a quick close-up of this scorpion:




Unfortunately, because he was trying to run and hide under the desk and everyone around here wears sandals except me, on the advice of my local friend, I had to kill it as these ones are venomous. Unlike with the huge wasps and bees flying in and out of our rooms all the time here, the locals are actually afraid of scorpions. My friends in the office were surprised to hear the next day that there was a scorpion in the office, as it hasn't happened before to anyone's knowledge.

Strangely, I found a scorpion in my bathroom three and a half weeks later! But this time the unwelcome guest was a bit smaller - only about 1cm long! Note that my left index finger is just under 1cm wide at the tip. I'm not really sure how I managed to spot such a small one from a distance, again from the corner of my left eye, but glad I got rid of him before he grew to a more dangerous size and hid in one of my shoes (a bad habit of scorpions).




This beetle sat dead on my desk for a few days, and since he was kinda shiny I took a photo before I threw him away:




This hairy moth was in my bedroom for a few hours; the wingspan was about 5 inches:




This guy was walking around outside and caught my attention pretty quickly - just look at the artwork on his wings and the crazy cartoon face! I'm not sure if those are supposed to be Disney-style fake eyes or what, but they're AWESOME!




Close-up of the shot above:




Front view:

My First Visit to China

On April 10th, after one and a half weeks in Vancouver, my parents and baby sister drove me back to the airport. We had a nice coffee after I checked in, then I headed through security and off to my gate for my first trip to China. The flight to Beijing took about 11 hours, and there was some nice scenery along the way as we flew up the coast of BC, along the coast of Alaska, and back down along the coast of Russia and Korea. This photo is somewhere over the far eastern reaches of the Asian part of Russia:




I had to take a photo of this sign on the inside of the bathroom stall door in the Beijing airport - I agree, it certainly is more convenient to use the loo when the door isn't wide open:




I spent a few hours in the Beijing airport, which wasn't all that great in my opinion. I'm not sure whether it was just the part of the airport I was in, but there were very few food services available. I ended up finding a cafe with good coffee and tasty mango smoothies though. Then I caught my next flight to Kunming, in Yunnan Province (in south central China), arrived after midnight, found my hotel, and went to sleep.

On the 12th I spent several hours walking around Kunming. It's surprisingly quiet for a city of 8 million - mainly because gasoline-powered motorcycles are not permitted in the city. Instead, everyone drives around on electric motorbikes, which are extremely quiet (to the point of danger, really, since they often drive full speed on the sidewalk without making their presence known to pedestrians).








I spent 4 nights in Kunming. Most of the days were spent in an office helping with some English proofreading, and avoiding mosquitoes:




Beautiful scenic view from the office:




On the 15th I caught an overnight sleeper bus to Mangshi/Luxi. It wasn't terribly uncomfortable, and it was nice actually having a bed on a bus for once rather than a cramped seat. 3 long rows of bunk beds on a bus definitely wouldn't pass Canadian safety standards, but it would be a lot more comfortable than a Greyhound!

After a few hours in Mangshi I made my way by road to Nabang, a town on the border with Burma. We had to wait about half an hour at one point while an accident was cleared up, as the road was blocked in both directions, but other than that the 5 hour drive was quite easy, with nice scenery. A typical view:




I spent the next seven and a half weeks in this area, helping out in an office with various tasks such as proofreading, working on databases and data entry forms, and eating a lot of rice. I managed to get food poisoning once, which is quite an accomplishment since I never get sick, and I drank the equivalent of a full-sized keg of orange drink. Each litre has 1700 calories, so you can imagine how healthy that was for me...


Photos of interesting creepy crawlies coming up in the next post!

Uppsala - London - Vancouver

I left Uppsala in the very early hours of April 1st, after packing up all my stuff from my apartment, including my bedding, and flew to London Heathrow.

I found out a few days earlier that my good friend Vania was actually flying to Mexico the same day, so we managed to spend a couple hours together in the airport, which was awesome!




I then flew from London to Toronto, where I cleared customs and carried my heavy bags (after all, I carried ALL of my belongings from my long stay in Sweden, plus the stuff I bought in Asia) by hand to the transit lounge, as Toronto Pearson Airport kindly chose to charge an absurd $2 for a luggage trolley. Way to welcome people to the country.

Flying in to Toronto:




After a little while, I was back up in the sky heading west to Vancouver. The snow-covered prairies were interesting to watch as they passed below us:




I spent 10 days in Vancouver, taking care of various odds and ends and visiting family and friends, including participating on April 4th in my sister's boyfriend's final project for his documentary film program - The Beer Mile (click here to watch).

Matt Duquette (the guy making the film) decided to get a few people together to participate in the Beer Mile with him. It was simultaneously a terrible but terrific decision to agree to participate. I do not recommend anyone else doing it, although at the same time I highly recommend it.

The Beer Mile is a race wherein you drink a can of beer as fast as you can, run a lap of the track (400m = 1/4 mile), drink another beer as fast as you can, run another lap, until you've had four cans of beer and run four laps of the track. The beer foams up in your stomach, which is not at all pleasant, but the challenge of keeping it down and trying to defeat your opponents is fun and hilarious. JF, Matt, Spencer, and David can be seen here:




The same four are seen here, along with one of Matt's classmates who was assisting with the filming:




And there's me, not the fastest by any means, trying to finish and hoping to place second-last (my normal place in any track events back when I was on the track team in primary school)...




The track was not cleared before the event, so we had to share with children on bikes, who couldn't keep up with me:




Spencer and I weren't trying to place first - we were the men in jeans, taking our time, while the others were going for gold:




However, one thing that didn't make it into the final cut of the film, is that I did manage to place second-last with a crowd-pleasing final dash to the finish during which I nearly knocked another kid off the track (kid should have been checking her rear-view mirror and pulling off to the side, clearly hasn't taken a drivers' ed course yet).




The day after the Beer Mile, I had lunch with my friends Howard and Margarita.






That evening I hung out with my friend Denise downtown. We had bubble tea and chilled at the beach at English Bay while the sun set, which was really nice.






On the morning of the 6th, I went to the dentist to get some old fillings replaced. This is the view from my chair, until they lowered me down and gave me the ceiling to stare at...




On April 10th I flew from Vancouver to Beijing to Kunming. Photos of my first trip to China will be posted in a couple of days.

March in Sweden

I spent all of March in Uppsala, Sweden, working on my thesis and searching online for jobs and an internship to finish up my degree requirements. I didn't take a whole lot of photos as I spent most of my time in my apartment or in the library, away from natural light and human time schedules.

Descending the escalator at Arlanda airport to the subterranean train station when I arrived at the end of February:




It wasn't particularly warm when I arrived in Sweden - definitely nothing close to the 30+ weather I'd been experiencing in Burma a few days earlier!

Here's the River Fyris, frozen over and covered in snow, with Uppsala Cathedral in the background:




A few more shots of the River Fyris from other parts of town on different days:








After arranging an internship through a contact I made on a train in Burma, I headed to Stockholm to get a visa to enter China. Walking back from the embassy, which is in the middle of nowhere past the Djurgården area of town, the water was really well frozen. Check out how thick this saltwater ice is - at least 4 inches!




Back in Uppsala, when I wasn't being a hermit in my apartment or the library, I was generally cycling to one café or another to catch up with friends. This is one of the many, many nice cafés in Uppsala. Going for fika is definitely one of the best things about Uppsala, and perhaps Sweden as a whole.




When my friend Namiko (she studied with me in New Zealand, years ago) was visiting for a few days, I took her to the cemetary next to my area of the university to show her the family grave of the Hammarskjöld family, which includes the grave of Dag Hammarskjöld, the celebrated 2nd Secretary General of the UN who died after his plane crashed (perhaps shot down) in Africa in 1961.




We also headed over to the castle, where I showed her the cannon pointed toward the cathedral. Many years ago, in order to maintain his position of power, the king arranged for these cannon to point directly at the cathedral so that the head of the Church of Sweden would think twice before doing anything to challenge the power of the king.





Having arranged an internship in Asia starting in April, I left Sweden earlier than expected - on April 1st of all days. More on that in the posts to come...