Blagging

I'm not really sure I can still call myself a traveller, much as I'd love to still carry the title the fact is I have a lease on a flat and work in and office, the evidence is stacked against me. However, I am still freeloading wherever possible and that must count for something!

A few weeks ago I found my way into a Levi's party with free booze all night and live acts I'm told (though not sure I believe) were famous Canto-pop star and two weeks ago at the races I talked my way into winning a football shirt without any of the skills to win it honestly. That said the Levi's party didn't really test my blagging skills and unfortunately the shirt turned out to be a German one and nice as that would be if I was German I'm English so....

However, my best bit of recent freeloading was when I boarded a junk full of engineers and architects and claimed to be one of them for a night of wining and dining. I have to say I survived pretty well though did have momentary doubts about my abilities when we got to the restaurant and I found myself sat between the host company's top directors, haha all good clean fun!

Back to the present and I'm now into my last few days at Ogilvy and I've booked my flight up into China for Friday though my travel plans have now changed a little. I know I've been living in China for about 10 months but it would appear I'd not really looked at a map of the place.

It's bloody massive! Having now purchased the Lonely Planet/ Lying Planet/ Bible (delete as you see fit) and looked at the distances from HK to Shanghai then onto Beijing and back I've reduced my itinerary. Really, using over land Chinese public transport to get back from Beijing as I'd originally planned it would take me about a year!! (well, 40 some hours and that's the expensive fast train). So, for this trip its just Shanghai for the bright lights, Huaiyin for scary middle of nowhere and Guilin/ Yangshuo for climbing up and jumping down things, bring it on!!!

I've actually been quite enjoying my last few weeks here at Ogilvy, really not caring to watch your mouth and being brutally honest is very entertaining at times. And, without wanting to jinks myself, immigration are making all the right noises and I've spent an afternoon with the new company and they seem like a good crowd so its all looking rather good.

And that's me, other than the China trip and new job my only plans are Coldplay tickets for July and obviously, watching the Mighty Mighty England in the World Cup in 19 days, happy happy days.

Assuming I can blag my way through China I'll be in touch soon,

Jonathan.

On the road again

It looks like I'm going to be back travelling in a few weeks time but as I really do love being on the road I'm not sure if I'm pleased or not that it'll only be for a couple of weeks before I'm back in HK starting a new job.

Yes, I've convinced some other unsuspecting fool that I'm worthy of employment. But now I have the fun part, spending hour upon hour queuing up to get into a longer queue to be referred to yet more queues at the immigration office, woohoo!

However there is a pay off, after hours of queue based fun this morning I discovered it's going to take something like forever for HKSAR to accept or decline my visa transfer so… I’m planning to grab the opportunity of adding to my 14 days annual leave and to head up into China and explore for a couple of weeks once current job finishes.

But that's not happened yet, what really needs telling is that I've just come back from a weekend in China. This could be described as a trial run for a bigger trip but in actual fact that would be a lie, it was really all about sport and alcohol.

A crowd of us headed over the boarder and after the fun of mainland immigration bureaucracy (amazingly even more fastidious than HK's) we proceeded to lose about 8.5 balls per shot on a lovely course that appeared to have been planned to match the worlds land-mass to water ratio. Seriously, if we weren't sending our caddies into lakes to retrieve balls they were raking up the mountains of sand we'd shovelled around the vast bunkers. Did you notice that, yes, we had caddies. And we had buggies. Class.

Those of us that played (rather than fairly tempting lazing round the pool with G&Ts option) had 36 holes over two days of great golf Saturday night was filled with beer and merriment. Bev and I even joined the Philippino band and treated the resort restaurant to a rather fine karaoke rendition of John Denver's Leaving On A Jet Plane. I think everyone was impressed!

And the golf competition itself, as it's always a competition... I have to say that on a challenging course the other three members of the four-ball played some wonderful golf. I really had to be at my exceptional best to woop every one of them. That's right I finish the weekend as the crowned champion of China and I have to say, modest as I always like to be... WINNER!

Oh yes, and while on the coach both there and back we spotted random naked blokes strolling along the motorway, got to love China!

Until the next time,

Jonathan.