Yes, folks, it is true. You can buy those attractive Crocs shoes for your kids all over the world (I picked up this flyer in Shanghai.)
Then again, I’m not sure that this is a good thing….
Tag: China
I’m always hearing the China Business Network‘s Christine Lu on Twitter going on about picking up her favorite Jasmine Boba Tea.
While we were in Shanghai together on the China 2.0 Tour, she took me to the chain place that offers her favorite version of the drink.
The drink/light food restaurant rbt (“real brewed tea”) has a little green rabbit as a mascot and modern green decor (plus a couple of swings to hang out in.)
Its menu features a variety of tea-based drinks that I enjoyed and that I think would appeal to kids.
rbt brings Taiwanese-style tea drinks to much of China, with the added fun of little liquid-filled “boba” or bubbles/balls made of tapioca.
You suck them up, along with the milky green tea, through a special large straw.
Kids will like the juices and smoothies as well, so stop by rbt for some refreshment if you happen to spy the little green rabbit.
Here are the locations in Hong Kong, in mainland China (listings in Chinese) and in Malaysia and (wow) Albuquerque, New Mexico.
During the China 2.0 Tour, our blogger gaggle took the “soft sleeper” overnight train from Beijing to Shanghai, China. We left at about 7:30 pm at night from Beijing and arrived Shanghai at 7 am.
In China, perfect strangers share four-person compartments (both men and women together) but we re-jiggered compartment assignments as much as we could to have at least a few of our 2.0 Tour bloggers in the same compartment.
I shared with two very nice Chinese passengers and the ever-buoyant and enjoyable David Feng.
We had dinner aboard the train and I slept like the proverbial log. Something very soothing about that clickety-clack….
For my RSS readers and anyone else who can’t see the video box below, here is the URL for the video on YouTube.
Categories
Happy feet in Beijing
After a long flight to Beijing for the China 2.0 Tour, I went with a group of our “old China hands” to find a foot massage/reflexology place as a way to attack everyone’s jet lag.
We ended up in a three-story foot emporium, a chain business in China, called Liangzi.
We split up into groups of three.
Elliott Ng of travel search site UpTake, Ernst-Jan Pfauth the Dutch ProBlogger and I went into a nice, comfy small room where each of us had a foot masseuse work the living daylights out of our feet and legs for about the next hour and a half.
Heavenly.
Elliott speaks some Chinese, so we spoke back and forth as well as we could (the two guys had women masseuses, I had a man) and talked about where we were from and what we were doing in China.
My masseuse was “Number 87;” I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t know his actual name because I had no pen and paper handy. He was only 19, said that he works the 10:30 am to 1:30 am shift and that I was his 7th client.
He was super-nice and efficient and by the end of our session, I had had my toes, arches, heels and calves pretty thoroughly mooshed, rubbed, prodded and smacked.
Each masseuse was very sensitive to discomfort, the room was soothing and I drank lots of hot water with lemon and honey (supposedly to help flush out toxins.)
On the way out, we also had a short shoulder and back massage.
After a 20 hour flight, carrying luggage and schlepping a laptop on my shoulders, this was MOST helpful to my mental attitude.
The whole session was about US$15 – a total bargain, obviously.
(This is cross-posted on the Perceptive Travel blog and Every Dot Connects.)
I know that I’m a very fortunate freelance writer and social media/Web 2.0 trainer; I have a military pension and health insurance from my 22+ years in the US Navy. I can ride out the current economic storm (with a lot of belt-tightening) so it’s somewhat easier for me than for others to set fiscal angst aside and go to China next week….to meet a bunch of Chinese bloggers.
That’s probably what the China 2.0 Tour might seem like from a distance, and you might well ask; what is the ROI (business Return on Investment) from getting to know “a bunch of bloggers and tech types?” Is that how I should be spending my limited funds?
Here’s why — as a good friend once said about me, I’ve never been about looking back. I’ve always been about looking ahead to the future.
Unless I’m sorely mistaken, 245 million Chinese Internet users might be rather important to someone like me who mostly publishes online, and who consults and teaches entry-level workshops in all of this heavily-connected Webby stuff. Travel writing is only one activity supporting my overall life philosophy, which is to attempt to understand how things work and how people tick.
That’s why Christine Lu and Elliott Ng asked me to join China 2.0….from the Web site, here is what they’re trying to accomplish:
“Led by The China Business Network and co-organized by Web2Asia and CNReviews, the inaugural China 2.0 Tour is sponsored by Edelman Digital China and represents a unique opportunity for companies and individuals to gain a deeper understanding of China. Unlike a typical business conference or large trade delegation, we seek to go ‘one-level deeper’ by creating a series of small-scale, exclusive meetups where people can share more openly about their business successes and challenges, and provide a deeper view into the nature of building a successful venture in China.
We also are taking an interdisciplinary approach by looking at social media, clean technology, gaming, wireless, and other areas where trends in China will affect markets around the world.
We also seek to provide informal opportunities to go off-message and off-the-record, so that long-lasting relationships can be built….”
Not only will I meet all sorts of key people in China, including many directly related to my travel and social media work, but I’ll also get to know my fellow Tour attendees — people like:
- Shel Israel, co-author with Robert Scoble of one of the seminal Web 2.0 books, Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
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- Sam Lawrence, CMO of Jive Software and enterprise 2.0 influencer behind Go Big Always.
- Mike Butcher — Editor, TechCrunch UK and Ireland.
- Ernst-Jan Pfauth — Editor-In-Chief, The Next Web and Co-Organizer, Blog 08 in the Netherlands.
- Melissa Sconyers, who won a contest sponsored by Mashable to create a new kind of online resume, called VisualCV. She’ll blog for Mashable in China.
How much I’ll be able to post here while in China will depend upon Internet connectivity and more importantly, time available. I’ll certainly do my best, although this is more of a tech visit than a travel visit.
I’m not going to be able to make the Guangzhou leg of the Tour (and will miss the Chinese Blogger Conference where Shel is a featured speaker – phooey) because finances wouldn’t allow it, but I will spend extra days in Shanghai and will have more pure-play travel goodies from there, I would think.
Thanks very much to my sponsors Every Dot Connects and UpTake – Your First Step to a Great Trip, and the support I’ve gotten from BootsnAll’s Cheap Air Tickets in order to get me there and back.
My readers know what a semi-psychotic fan I am of Web 2.0/social media, not because the shiny tools themselves give me vapors, but because they allow me to meet and become friends with the most amazing people.
One of those friendships just brought me a stupendous opportunity – Elliott Ng of the travel research site UpTake and Christine Lu of the China Business Network have kindly invited me to be a participating blogger in the China 2.0 Tour in November, which ends with attending China BloggerCon in Guangzhou.
It’s hard to even type that, I’m so excited!
Other participants include author Shel Israel, tech expert Robert Scoble and Sam Lawrence of Jive Software.
This is certainly not a family travel opportunity, per se, nor is it really travel at all although we will have a little time for that. It’s mostly a tour to plug into what’s going on in social media in China, and meet many of the major players face-to-face. Since I teach Web 2.0/social media workshops and do consulting with Every Dot Connects, it’s a wonderful fit for me.
More information to follow as soon as I have it, and thanks for the support!
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(photo courtesy silverlinedwinnebago at flickr’s Creative Commons.)
“In the bleak midwinter” there are plenty of cool things to do, like the Ice and Snow Festival in Harbin, China.
It’s an entire town built of ice, and illuminated at night. Amazing.
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I’ve said before that Hong Kong is my favorite city in the world and you should take the kids there for a visit if at all possible.
This morning, I realized that I’d put a shortcut on my computer desktop to a site called “Learning Cantonese,” but I couldn’t remember what it was so I clicked on it.
Well. Glad I saved this.
Author Daisann McLane writes this fabulous blog about living in Hong Kong and the trials, tribulations and bliss therein (including the fact that actually trying to learn Cantonese has sometimes reduced her to tears of frustration.)
I would love to meet this fellow writer some day, since she also writes a National Geographic Traveler magazine column that I like called “Real Traveler,” plus articles about Caribbean music and books about cheap hotels.
Isn’t it fun to start your morning with a great discovery?
Update today: I should have also added a link to the BootsnAll Hong Kong [Travel] Logue, a “one-stop travel guide to Hong Kong.”
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Technorati tags: travel, Hong Kong, Daisann McLane, China
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Family Travel: Take the Kids to Hong Kong
I recently had the opportunity to take my daughter to Hong Kong; it’s my favorite city in the world since I made my first Navy port visit there in 1985.
I’ve seen it before and after the vaunted turnover to the Chinese, and it’s still the same sparkling, colorful urban jewel.
Think of it as sort of a Chinese New York, with all of the energy and verve and excitement which that analogy implies.
We visited along with my intrepid 20-something nephew on a Go-Today package; just the airfare and hotel because I said “no thanks” to the included tour. I already knew where we wanted to go and what we wanted to see. The package was a Hong Kong-Tokyo combined deal; you’ll see the rest tomorrow when I post the link to my article about Tokyo in the San Antonio Express-News. (Update: here’s the link to my post “Navigating Tokyo with a ‘tween” including a link to the article plus other good Tokyo info.)
With a package, you are limited to a menu of hotels at different price ranges, but we weren’t going on this trip to admire our hotel. The Stanford Hillview on Kowloon side was fine; rooms were comfortable, staff was helpful and breakfast was OK.
Speaking of breakfast — I have now had a traditional Chinese breakfast and a traditional Japanese breakfast and I prefer….the traditional Norwegian breakfast! (smoked salmon, yogurts, cheeses, pickled herring in tomato sauce, fruit, meats, hearty bread, good coffee.)
Anyway, just getting around Hong Kong is half the fun. Assuming you arrive at Hong Kong International, grab your MTR Pass at the tourist desk and kick back as the Airport Express train whisks you efficiently into town in 20-40 minutes. Getting you and your family around is easy on buses, subway trains and fun double-decker trams.
The best transport, however, is the Star Ferry, which in just minutes takes you back and forth across the narrow strip of water that separates Hong Kong Island from the mainland (Kowloon side.) No extra charge for the spectacular views.
The city is wonderfully walkable, so go to the well-designed tourist Web site, figure out what you and the kids would like to do, and take off.
My top recommendations for Hong Kong family travel:
** See the nightly laser light show at 8 p.m. from Kowloon side, either standing at the Sidewalk of the Stars or sitting (with a Shirley Temple or Coke for them and a good gin and tonic for you) in the lobby bar of the Intercontinental Hong Kong Hotel.
** Check out the options under the Tourist Board’s Cultural Kaleidoscope program; how would your kids like a (free) morning tai chi class overlooking the harbor?
** While exploring Wan Chai and Central, visit the original Shanghai Tang store in the Pedder Building. Wildly expensive and wildly imaginative and gorgeous. We haunted the sale rack till we found something we could afford.
** Ride the Mid-Levels escalators up the Hong Kong hills, then hop off and wander some side streets.
** There are several very good museums; we liked the Hong Kong Museum of History for a comprehensive look at the city’s origins and development.
** Wander through the Kowloon/Nathan Road big branch of Yue Hwa Chinese Products Emporium (check out the snake wine, with snake included, in the food store, plus colorful packaging on Chinese herbs and medicines one floor up.) Rubber ear with acupuncture spots noted in Chinese? Great inexpensive souvenirs.
** A nighttime tram trip up to Victoria Peak (in clear weather) to admire the city laid out before us.
For more info, check out Frommer’s Favorite Experiences in Hong Kong, MSN Travel’s take here and this excellent article on GoNOMAD.
For serious shoppers (poking, browsing, buying and schlepping is a serious sport in HK) my personal favorite shopping Bible is by Suzy Gershman: Born to Shop Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing (Suzy includes some teen-oriented shopping tips from her own young son Aaron.)
Get your family going to Hong Kong; it’s worth every jet-lagged minute.
Related posts:
- Oh China, Part One (taking young kids to Beijing, first in series)
- Oh China, Part Two
Technorati tags: travel, family travel, Hong Kong, China, Asia
