In China, Christmas is a mere blip on the screen. Because our school is international, we had vacation - but no one else in China was off. Spring Festival (known more as "Chinese New Year" back in the US) is the big holiday - a two week extravaganza in which most everybody is off work and visiting with family. Because our international school happens to be in China, we get this time off school as well :)
Back in November, we booked airline flights for our upcoming 2-week holiday to southeast Asia. In case you missed that post, here's our itinerary:
Jan 23-26 Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia (on the island of Borneo)
Jan 26-31 Singapore
Jan 31-Feb 3 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Airfare was cheap (thanks to AirAsia), as was the lodging in Kuala Lumpur. The problem was Singapore. That little island is expensive! We looked and looked and looked at hotels, and didn't find much in our price range. And all the "budget" hotels we found were in the red light district - and Singapore has legalized prostitution. I vetoed staying there. (though I could never quite tell if Rachel agreed with me or not on that...)
Then, the perfect place offered a sale - a really nice hotel, downtown near the shopping district. I saw it at 10am. Rachel also thought it was a good place. But by the time we got home to buy it, the price was up by $25 a night. (a couple days later, it went up another $20 per night. We really missed a good deal!)
So we looked and looked and looked some more. We started looking at hostels as well. Rachel began staying up past bed time reading the endless reviews available online...so I "took her off the case" for awhile.
I looked and looked and looked a little more.
Finally, on Friday, we decided to go the hostel route and found a nice-looking "boutique homestay" for the price we originally wanted to pay. It's no 5-star hotel, but it should be comfortable. We'll let you know if it was the right decision!
But it is wonderful to be able to say that the major planning details are DONE and I don't have to look at expedia again anytime soon!
-alan
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1 comment:
that place looks great! other than not having a private bathroom, i can't imagine that you'll miss having stayed in a hotel.
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