Greg and Kat's blog

As we have been travelling, one can’t help but compare the places we have been. They were all good and I wouldn’t had dropped any of them from the trip. That being said, some were better in different ways.

Here are my comparisons, broken up by country or city, depending on my feeling about them…

How easy is it to travel there as a unilingual English speaker?

1. Singapore. It’s basically a no-contest win for Singapore: English and Mandarin are the two effectively-used languages everywhere.
2. Manila. English is effectively an official language here. Pretty much everybody has basic conversational English, and everybody we’ve come across has at least enough to do their job.
3. Hong Kong. There is the occasionally place in HK with very rudimentary English, and a few more with none, but not many.
4. Thailand. I was surprised how much English was spoken: they’re very much set up for tourists. There were maybe a few places we had to fall back to point-and-gesture, but not many.
5. Malaysia
6. Hangzhou. I suspect I’ll have a lot more to say about how inward-looking China is, as time goes on.

Where would I want to actually live for an extended period?

1. Manila
2. Hong Kong
3. Hangzhou. It’s hard to give Hangzhou a fair comparison here. My thoughts on moving to Manila are “everybody speaks english and is friendly, wheee!” For Hangzhou, I have much more realistic problems like “where the hell is the laundry?” that aren’t on the radar for other places.
4. Bangkok
5. Singapore. I like Singapore, but it’s somehow a little too sterile. It’s like a Disneyland version of Asia for tourists who don’t want to get dirty. I don’t think you could get food poisoning in Singapore if you tried, and where’s the fun in that?
6. Chiang Mai. The problem with Chiang Mai is that it’s a tourist town. Foreign and Thai, but it there doesn’t seem to be a lot going on except foreigners walking around.

Which would I want to come back to?

1. Manila, with family involvement weighing heavily on the ranking.
2. Hong Kong
3. Hangzhou
4. Malaysia (but probably not KK)
5. Bangkok
6. Singapore, but I’ll probably be back if travelling in Asia, again as a break.
7. Chiang Mai

How willing would I be to drive there?

1. Singapore
2. Hong Kong
3. Chiang Mai
4. Kota Kinabalu
5. Bangkok
6. Manila
7. Hangzhou

GDP per capita (PPP) in USD, according to Index Mundi.

1. Singapore, $60,500
2. Hong Kong, $49,800
3. United States, $49,000
4. Canada, $41,100
5. Macau, $33,000
6. Malaysia, $15,800
7. Thailand, $9,500
8. China, $8,500
9. Philippines, $4,100 (but I suspect this doesn’t include remittance which is a significant amount, and a lot of wealth is concentrated in Manila)

Gini coefficient, according to Index Mundi. Higher numbers mean more uneven income distribution.

1. Canada, 32.1
2. United States, 45.0
3. Philippines, 45.8
4. Malaysia, 46.2
5. Singapore, 47.3
6. China, 48.0
7. Macau, 48
8. Hong Kong, 53.3
9. Thailand, 53.6

The University had a driver meet me at the airport and take me to my apartment. I felt a certain affection for Mr. Li. He spoke about as much English as I speak Chinese. I think we bonded. He liked something about Canada: maybe a singer.

Amy Gu was kind enough to meet me at the apartment. She helped me figure out the heat in my room, which was a life saver. There will be more to say about heating and infrastructure in another post.

After she left, I realized there was no kettle in the room. A hotplate but no pots. No way to boil water. No drinking water. After a brief panic, I found a nearby market still open with bottled water. Also a coffee shop with Internet, so I could at least email Kat.

[Note to self: never arrive in a completely foreign city after dark. Critical things are closed, and it’s much harder to navigate.]

After I got back, the exchange students upstairs told me that there was a breaker for the hot water heater, and life started to look up.

I woke up this morning to snow. An inch of wet nasty snow on the ground, and still falling. When I opened the curtains, I actually said out loud (to no one) “I’m going back to the Philippines.” As I recall, snow is pretty rare in Hangzhou, so it should disappear soon.

Hopefully the phone stores are open this morning and I can get a local SIM with some data. With a little more luck, Amy will be able to find somebody to figure out the Internet in my room and I’ll be properly connected.

Quick update in the afternoon: have a phone with data at least. Snow is mostly melted.