A Blog About Things We Do

(places and topics list)

Month: March 2024

  • Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Macau… except not Shanghai

    Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Macau… except not Shanghai

    Tickets back home to Michigan over Xmas were too expensive this year which meant Lindsay and I had to figure out what to do to maximize our time together over the holiday break.

    To be honest I would have probably stayed in Japan and spent our modest budget visiting a new region or city or something, but Lindsay really wanted to go somewhere totally new and tickets were reasonably cheap to Shanghai, China – unfortunately the tourist visa was something like $185 USD and took a long time to process… BUT you can get a transit visa for 144 hours as long as you are flying through China somewhere else. In other words, you can’t book a trip Tokyo -> China -> Tokyo and qualify for a transit visa but you CAN book a trip Tokyo -> China -> Hong Kong -> Tokyo. So this is what we booked.

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  • Tokyogurt: Part One – New Beginnings

    Tokyogurt: Part One – New Beginnings

    This is, obviously, a bit of a different topic than my normal travel related updates, but I wanted to write in this blog a bit more often. My primary motivation is simply that I think I should write more than I do in general – too much consumption, not enough generation.

    Most of my early yogurt making memories come from my Mom. She used (maybe still uses?) quart jars filled with milk and put under a towel with a heating pad (the type you use for a sore back) underneath the jars. From what I remember this always worked really well. I actually wonder now why we didn’t do this all the time, I feel like it was a “few times a year” thing.

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