If you have read my previous posts, you would have noticed that I have mostly been talking about places in LA. Asia seems like a huge but refreshing jump from LA. In this post, I’m going to briefly explain to you my rationale behind the Asia trip and my travel plan. In the following posts, I will take you along the journey with me stop by stop!
The original idea of my Asia trip
Asia seems like a very exotic idea for many people in the western world. To be fair, even though I was born in China, a major player in Asia, I can’t say that I know Asia much.
Asia occupies a huge space on earth and is a combination of many, many countries and culture. In fact, Asia occupies around 44.5 million km² (17 million square miles) of land and there are 48 countries in Asia. To put it in perspective, it is the largest continent in area, followed by Africa that is about 30 million km² (12 million square miles).
Putting my consulting slide-making skills in action, I present to you this rough overview of the ranking of the continents by area. (The map does not present an exact segregation of continents and countries.)
Before this summer, I can only say that I have really visited one country in Asia, China, which granted is already humongous on its own. I have transited my flights in Korea and Japan, but those short stays in the airports really don’t count. Seeing many of my friends in LA have traveled to different parts of Asia, I decided to explore Asia myself.
Many people will just start planning and backpacking at this point, but I am really too poor for that now. I want to be able to make money on my trip (legally of course). So I started my trip planning by applying for internships in Singapore, which I chose because it is quite an expat-friendly place and a good transition point from the West to the East.
Thus, the whole trip was catalyzed by an internship offer in Singapore. I want to make most out of this trip so I started reaching out to families and friends in other parts of Asia and asked them if they will want me to pay a visit.
Final travel plan
The final plan for now is that I will travel to at least three very different places in Asia:
Shenyang
Hong Kong
Singapore
I will spend majority of my time in Singapore since that’s where I will be interning. Hopefully I can squeeze some time in between my internship to travel to other places in Southeast Asia. Besides Singapore, I will make short trips to Hong Kong and Shenyang, so they will be condensed trips but hopefully hitting the best spots.
If you have any suggestions on where to go, especially in Southeast Asia, please send me an email! I would love to hear your advice.
Blog plan
By the time this post is posted, I have already traveled to Shenyang and Hong Kong and I am staying in Singapore. To present to you the best advice that I have for traveling to these places, the sequence of the posts will be as following:
Hong Kong
Singapore part 1 – food
Singapore part 2 – sightseeing
Shenyang
Here is a brief sneak peak of these places:
1.Hong Kong
2. Singapore
3. Shenyang
Stay tuned for more!