Thailand! finally!

September 16th, 2010

last night, well really this morning we landed in Thailand. we paid the equivalent of 30 dollars for a hostel and what we got was basically our own little house that was 2 km from the phuket airport. Tamaras Guest House I believe it was called. For 30 bucks it was an AMAZING deal, it wasn’t one of those hostels with the bunk beds that I imagine when I think of backpacking though europe, it was just like an actual hotel room. It was way better than the room that I paid 73 USD for in Tukwila near the Seatac airport. AND they even have free wifi something that the Royal View Hotel was lacking, big disappointment there. I had to pay an extra 60 USD on top of the 70 USD for that hotel in Hong Kong. But whatever.

Now we are here in Pa Tong which is on the southern part of Phuket, which is an island in the south of Thailand. Once again we are in a hostel, oops I mean guest house that we found on hostelworld.com. Anyways this place is $20 a night and it is just a smallish hotel room and once again free wifi which I am using to post this blog entry. I feel that I should mention that I just checked expedia.com again to make sure I wasn’t stupid, and I found that according to Expedia the Royal View Hotel has free high speed internet which I know from experience to be FALSE and my bank account agrees. But that’s enough griping about the Royal View Hotel.

Thailand has been really great so far, we came to Patong, sat on the beach and relaxed, ate some chicken from a street cart, got ripped off by some merchants, then hand washed our clothes, and finally we walked around in search of food and decided to eat at the Patong Food Park on Rat-u-thit road. Rat-u-thit is the 2nd most important road in Patong, which is not saying much seeing as Patong only has two major streets. The other main street is called Beach St. and this street is how we knew for sure that we got ripped off.

I have learned two very valuable lesson from my experiences today:

  1. The people here can be extremely pushy when it comes to trying to convince you to buy something, it could be food, sandals, or obviously counterfeit Addidas track jackets (I’m pretty sure I am going to go back and try to get one of those jackets haha).
  2. There is no point in bargaining unless you understand how much the object that you are bargaining over is worth.

The second one is what got us. We walked away thinking that we got a little ripped off but then when we saw the store on Beach Rd. selling the same exact things for a fraction of the cost we, we knew we had gotten the shaft. This is the last thing on the bargaining, for some reason people here love to quote 550 baht(baht is Thai currency) for lots of things (550 baht is the equivalent of 18 USD). They will say that they are giving you a discount but what they are really doing is trying to get you to start bargaining. You will inevitably cut the price in half. Next the merchant will say something along the lines of “I can’t live off of that!” or “work with me!” or maybe “I have kids to feed!”, all of these are false. then you go from 275 right up to 300 and you have your item, thinking you got a deal. But really he probably would have sold that thing for as little as 100 baht.  But anyways, that’s enough about that.

The food at the Patong Food Park was AMAZING for 280 baht (less than 9 USD), we got Chicken and fried noodles, Chicken fried rice, some thai veggie dish that I can’t pronounce, and a fresh cocunut. for 9 dollars both my girlfriend and I got extremely full stomachs and one of the best coconuts we have ever had. The problem is that if you want to eat on the beach the prices are pretty much quintupled. But the food was really amazing.

I hope tomorrow will be as great as today was. I’m sure it will, we’re going canoeing or something.

Posted in Gripes, Thailand, Travel | No Comments »

The Day in Hong Kong

September 14th, 2010

So, after our 13 hour flight from hell between Vancouver and Hong Kong we landed at 5:30AM Hong Kong time. We were VERY relieved to be on solid ground again and not cooped up in an airplane. We picked up our luggage and we were very eager to get to our hotel room for some much needed rest. And from this point on everything sort of went wrong.

I had Googled the address of the hotel and found that it was near a stop called Chueng Sha Wan so we took the subway there with all our luggage and went to the address, which took a while due to the lack of creature comforts such as 3G internet and GPS. This was probably quite a weird site since we were both wearing huge backpacks and dragging our luggage. When we got there the place was actually an arcade. Yes! an arcade! so we obviously had the wrong address.

After asking some security people at a shopping center we found that the hotel was actually at a subway stop called Chueng Wan, notice the lack of the Sha. The person actually wrote this down for us so we could remember. There was supposed to be an exit called B3 and hotel shuttles running.

When we got back to the subway station we found that there was no Chueng Wan station. There was a Shueng Wan and a Tsuen Wan station. Both of these when spoken sound very similar so we were at a loss. Shueng Wan is on Hong Kong Island and Tsuen Wan is up in the northern portion of the city. Since the address of the hotel said 353 Castle Peak Road, Hong Kong, Hong Kong, we just figured that the place to go was Shueng Wan. WRONG!

We stepped out of the subway station and there was no exit B3. We went to exit B and there were definitely no hotel shuttles. After standing there for a while we asked someone where an internet cafe was located. When we got to the internet cafe I googled the name of the hotel, Royal View Hotel, and found out there there are actually TWO 353 Castle Peak Roads. The other Castle Peak Road is Castle Peak Road (Ting Kau), because it is near the Ting Kau beach. And this mythical place was where we needed to be, and it was by the TSUEN WAN station which was on the opposite side of Hong Kong.

So we got to Tsuen Wan station and jumped on the Shuttle to the hotel and there we were. Now the next hiccup comes along. We were actually pretty hungry and just waiting for a friend to get off work so we could drop our heavy luggage off with her. We will only be taking the backpacks with us as mention in my last entry on the subject. So starving and tired, always a bad combination, we went to eat in the hotel restaurant. Then we came back to our room with a bad case of food coma and promptly fell asleep for 6 hours. We meant to sleep for 3. OOPS! tired and food coma is an even worse combination than tired and starving!

I woke up, looked at my watch, did the mental conversion to Hong Kong time and then thought “oh F***nuts!!!” it was 7:30PM. I was supposed to call my friend at 4:30PM and meet her around 5 and then leave for the airport to catch our flight at 9:10PM. It was obvious we were not gonna make it so we didn’t even try. 200 dollars EACH later, we had our flights to Thailand for tomorrow 9/15/2010.

Later I figured out what went wrong. I was so stupid tired that when I set my alarm I set it for 4:30PM which was the Hong Kong time that we needed to call our friend. The only problem was that my watch was still set for West Coast USA time haha. I guess, that’s what you get when you combine super tired, more than 24 hours traveling, and extreme hunger.

But all in all it turned out pretty well, other than the extra 200 dollars. We got to actually have dinner with our friend which was really nice.

So yeah, today in Hong Kong was a good day! Hopefully when we are back at the end of October we will really get to see and experience all the cool looking things that we passed by at light speed today. The Mong Kok stop looked exceptionally interesting and the Cheng Sha Wan stop is supposedly where the crazy electronics place is located. We’ll have six weeks, so I am sure we’ll explore all that and more.

Posted in Hong Kong, Travel | No Comments »

Starcraft II on Asus 1005HA

September 12th, 2010

I saw that someone came to my blog by searching “Starcraft II on Asus 1005HA.” What they found would not have told them anything about running that game on an Asus 1005HA.

For future individuals who happen to stumble onto my blog in search of similar information I will give you this.

about 3 weeks ago I actually did try to install and run Starcraft II on my Asus 1005HA (2gb ram, Atom N280, 6 cell battery). It might even still be installed. What I got was 100% unplayable.

So after it took over an hour to actually install the game I opened it up. Oh also you should know that the audio that plays during the installation was skipping. This should have made me think the game would run like crap, but I soldiered on. The starting animation with Tychus skipped HORRIBLY and was nearly impossible to watch. After getting through that I opened up the mission where you have to hold off the Zerg for 20 minutes. That mission is called Zero Hour I believe.

Anyways, as I looked at the in-game timer I saw that it was going extremely slowly. every time 1 second passed on the in-game timer 3 seconds passed on my watch. Also there was an extremely long delay between when I clicked on a unit and when the unit was actually selected which was quite annoying.

The game performed so horribly on my Asus 1005HA that it told me to close applications to increase performance. Unfortunately all my applications were already closed. I was  just eyeballing it but the game was running at somewhere between 4 and 8fps, if that.

So in closing I would just like to say that it is definitely not worthwhile to try and install starcraft 2 on your asus 1005HA, unless you want to deal with the game time being 1/3rd of normal time and horrible gameplay. On your asus 1005HA just stick to Starcraft 1.

Posted in Gadgets, Games, PC's, Tech | No Comments »

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