Shanghai

I’m here, I’m doing it. It’s very exciting.

I landed at 9:30pm local time last night, by the time I got to my hotel it was almost midnight.

So far my impressions are great, I think I am going to like living in this city. This weekend is going to be dedicated to finding somewhere to live, probably sharing a house with some other foreigners.

I’m still nervous about the work, I keep telling myself that I am a fast learner and I am tough so it will be fine. I have to find ways to make connections with the ex-pats here so that I get their details and their colleagues details. It doesn’t seem that easy, but I am sure I can figure it out.

I decided today that I have to make this work, it costs about $3-4 an hour for a cleaner to come to your apartment and clean everything & do washing and Ironing. My dream come true. but in all honesty, I do think this city will agree with me, it warm, cheap, clean, and I can live in a nice place with a cleaner & maybe a pool & gym. Sounds ideal. Just have to work hard.

It’s all happening

On Wednesday I got my official letter of offer for the job in Shanghai.

So, I’ve  booked a flight – leaving the UK on the 25th of  August. I have one week of work left at the bank I am working for, I have given my notice to the landlord and I really need to get myself organised.

So much to do.

I’m still really excited, although a little sad to be leaving England. I have wanted to live here for so long, and now I am here I have wasted so much time and not earned enough money to do much.

I only discovered yesterday that it is only 2.5 hours on the train to London. I haven’t even visited my friends in London. Oh well, its too late now. I just have to learn from this and make the most out of living in China. Do things with my weekends, explore the city and go for weekends away.

Today I am feeling optimistic, I really do love the idea of helping people manage their financial situations. This has the potential to be brilliant.

Shanghai

Finally, here is an update for you all. I’m moving to China! In 5 weeks or so. I’m still waiting on the official written letter of offer, but I have been offered a job in Shanghai working with an international financial planning organisation. This is a really really risky move for me. The reason it is risky is that the pay is 100% commission, no base pay. They  do pay half my rent, so I guess that is something.

My job for the first 12 months or so will be to make appointments for the consultant I am working with. That consultant then goes to the meeting and reviews the persons financial situation, then we review that information and based on their goals offer financial products to meet those goals. I get a commission when someone invests.

During the first 12 months or so I will be trained on the consultant side and put through an official training course, even though there are no legal requirements for a qualification or certification when it comes to international financial planning.

So it is all very exciting, a bit scary, and like I said, risky. But but it could be brilliant. I haven’t been to China before, but I really like all the other parts of Asia I have been to so I can’t see why this would be different.

On another note, I’m back on my medication for those of you who know about that. Its going really well and was a smart move.

I have also started yoga lessons here, I’m hoping to get back to a point where I remember it so that I can keep it going when I move.

And last but not least, Dan. We have had some rough patches, which was bound to happen, but things are going well now. It’s going to be sad to leave him (again), the current plan is to spend some time together at Christmas (assuming that I have holidays then) and he is going to come to China for 3 months in April. We can’t plan too much because I really don’t know how my money situation is going to, but we are sure we can work it out.

4 weeks

So, I have been away for 4 weeks. I mean, My flight was this time 4 weeks ago.

I think it is going well. Some things have been hard, but overall things are good.

Things with Dan are going well, mostly. As to be expected we have had a few disagreements, and since our flat is so tiny they become a lot bigger deals than they would otherwise. On the whole its good though, I have really enjoyed having someone to cook for and I think my omelets are getting better.

I’ve got a job too, I started last Monday. Its a fairly crap job, it really is highlighting for me how much of a snob I really am. I get paid crap too, but for work that is sooo easy its not at unreasonable wage really. England is still in the midst of a recession so I have been told that I am fairly fortunate to have gotten a job at all. Being more arrogant than that, I am also looking for a better job. I have learned to do three things in my current position.

1. Take staples out of paper, sort them into the right order and put them in a neat bundle.

2. Look up someone’s address based on account number & hand write that address onto an envelope

3. Go through a list of recently opened accounts on the computer and check that there is ID in the scanned pages.

BORING!!! Still, it is money so I can stop living off my savings soon.

I also joined the gym here. I havent been going as much as I want to, but I am going a bit. I wanted to do a 10km race in July, but I haven’t been putting in the hours for training so I think I’ll just do the 5km.

Umm, what else…. Oh, how could I forget. It’s COLD here! I am getting used to it and there have been some warm days – which lull me into a false sense of security. Most of the time I am cold, even my flat is cold.

I know this all sounds really negative, but I am enjoying it. There are some things I need to work on, clearly, but I’m still glad that I am here.

Badami

So it was a 6 hour bus trip from Hampi to Badami. I don’t usually mind the long bus trips, I put in my iPod and look out the window. Unfortunately – or some might say fortunately – I met an Irish guy on the bus. He didn’t stop talking, he wanted to talk the whole time. I eventually decided to try to sleep to shut him up. Don’t get me wrong, some company is good, some conversation is good and he was nice enough, but 6 hours is a long time on a very bumpy bus to be making chit-chat.

Then when I got there it was a little depressing. The reason I had decided to go to Badami is because of the caves, I’ll get to explaining the caves. Rooms were crap and expensive and loud, this pissed me off, especially since I spent 6 hours on a bus to get away from the noise.

So I decided to only spend 1 night and get out of there as soon as possible. In the morning I got up and went to the caves, I was in a bad mood and generally not feeling very happy. The caves changed all of that – well, the caves themselves were just caves, caves with amazingly detailed carvings and temples built in, but still caves. It was the school kids again that saved it.

This time I sat talking to a group of about 50 high school students and their teachers, they were all really lovely. People usually want to shake my hand, and the girls like to pat my arm or you could say ‘stroke’ This group was really funny because whenever a new teacher came forward and the principal showed up at one point, the girls made a really ig deal about me shaking their hand. It was really funny.

It put me in really good spirits for the bus trip. The bus trip was another 6 hour event. I had many conversations with people and I met a group of girls from an English-speaking school. They quizzed me, they wanted to see my passport and started to read it. They asked me all about Australia and wanted to know thing like our national flower and animal etc. I didn’t know most of it. They asked our Prime Ministers name and how to spell it. They were amazing, really wanting to take advantage of the learning opportunity that I was. Now I am back in Goa.

I’ll get to a Christmas post soon

If you haven’t seen it, there is a post about Hampi below.

Hampi

So I am way, way, way behind with my blogging at the moment. Let’s start with Hampi. I went to Hampi for a few days last week, it was Ok but exhausting. To be honest, i’m not too sure why everyone raves about it the way they do.

Hampi was the centre of some empire in the 13/14/15th Centuries, so there are loads of ruins around. This is all exciting, for the first 30 mins, but after a little while it all starts to look the same and it is just sad. Why is it sad? Because most of the ruins are ruins because of religious wars. The temples (both Hindu and Muslim) were defaced so that they could no longer be used as a place of worship. No matter what you believe, I think it is sad to have people destroying other people’s images of God or whatever.

The saving grace was that I did a tour of all these ruins on a Saturday. This meant there were heaps and heaps of schools from nearby – up to 6 hours drive – doing a field trip to see the ruins. So I had hundreds and I really do mean hundreds of kids wanting to touch my skin and ask me my name and practice the very little English they know “What is your name?” “What is your country?” and then sometimes they could ask “What is your mother name?” father name, brother name, sister name etc. It was so much fun. The kids really light up talking to me, they love it – so did I for that matter.

The only person who didn’t like it was my rickshaw driver. I had paid him to give me a day tour and he saw the kids as being ‘in the way’ of me seeing the sights where as I was sitting half out of the rickshaw so that I could shake everyone’s hand.

There are some photo’s of the kids on my flickr account. They also love having their photo taken. I had planned to stay in Hampi for 1 week, but it was too noisy and I wans’t that big of a fan so I went to Badami. See the post on Badami

Oh, I also spent 10Rs (a few cents) on getting a ‘blessing’ from the temple elephant.

so much to write about…

… and so little time.

Basically, I have done and seen loads of things but at the moment I dont have time to share.

Will put some photos and all that up soon ish.

The plan for the rest of my time in India:

Tomorrow, bus from Hampi to Badami. There are some caves at Badami and I don’t want to be here anymore.

Then on the 23rd I catch local bus or train to Hubili, that night I catch an overnight train to Goa – getting in at 6am or something stupid.

I then stay in Goa until the 3rd Jan. On the 3rd I catch a 30 hour train to Delhi. The next day I fly to Khujaraho (cant remember how its spelled and too tired to check). They have ancient caves with kama sutra style carvings in them. Then I fly to Varanasi. I won’t even try to explain it yet.

Then overnight train to Kolkata, there for 2 nights then fly to Kuala Lumpur on the 14th Jan.

Not too sure after that.  But getting to Bali somehow then home!

Goa

It’s been really nice to be in Goa. After the desert it’s good to be somewhere warm with great beaches and not as many sleezy men.
I’m staying with Chantalle which has been great. George and Henry (the poodles) are around for me to play with during the day and she has a nice apartment in the resort.

Tomorrow I am going to Hampi for a week, I have been told by many people that Hampi is a must. Then I am coming back to have Christmas and New Years with Chantalle and should be able to see Laura somewhere in there too.

I haven’t been doing much here, going to the beach a couple of times a day, eating healthy and amazing foods, doing my tai chi, and planning the rest of my trip.
It’s all very exciting – I am looking at getting into Australia mid-late Feb, to Sydney towards the end of Feb.

270 days

I have been away for!

Camel Safari

I have put some photos of it up on http://www.flickr.com/photos/meags/

At the start it was great. I have wanted to ride a camel ever since I rode an elephant in April. They are really funny animals, they look, sit, eat and walk funny.

It was really enjoyable for the first few hours. Then we stopped and our guide cooked us lunch while we rested in the shade of a tree.

It kind of went downhill from there. The afternoon was hard, my legs were really sore and they made us keep galloping so that we would make it to the sand dunes for sunset. bouncing half a metre up and down when your legs and but are already sore is not a good thing at all.

Then at night I was freezing. I tried to warn them I get cold easily (I mean I carry a jacket around in summer in Australia) but they just kept assuring me I would be fine. After what felt like hours and my toes were going numb I got out of my ‘bed’ to ask for an extra blanket.  Our guides had vanished, they had told us there were more blankets and to let them know if we needed anything. They were gone.

So, I took a blanket from their bed and tried to go to sleep. It was around this point my stomach decided to start churning. Never a good thing. After getting up in the freezing cold to go to the toilet my strange migraine started. These are the headaches I used to be on anti-epilepsy  medication to manage.

I thought at this point that it must be close to sunrise and that we would be getting out of there soon, so I checked the time. 11:30pm!!!! It was a horrible thing to learn.

So, I drugged myself up with sleeping tablets and tried to salvage the night, I just told myself everything would be better in the morning.

I’m not sure how long later, one of the guides came back and took his blanket, I asked for another one because I was still cold even with his think one but they didnt have any!

finally, I got to sleep. I work up with the sunrise and not surprisingly I was roasting under my 5 blankets with 3 layers of clothing on.

We set off and i told them I needed to leave early. We were meant to keep going until 5pm. My migraine wasn’t going away (they never ever last this long) and my stomach couldn’t handle food.

It wasn’t until I actually started crying (from the pain of the headache) that they took me seriously and said they could get a jeep to pick me up. Naturally, they tried to exploit the situation so that I would pay a fortune, luckily I am not that stupid. I managed to get the people from my guest house to come and get me from the next village and was in bed with strong pain killers within the hour.

So, all in all it was crap. But I am glad that I finally rode a camel and i have some good photos to show for it.