World travel
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About to fly from DC to Ethiopia (where I plan to live for a few years) for a week then to Seoul for a week then back to China for a month before moving to Addis Ababa. Not stoked for that amount of flying especially since I just did a **** ton of flying to get to USA a little bit ago. I did Beijing to Xiamen to LA to San Diego to Boise to SLC to DC in about a week.
I'm hoping I get stuck in Seoul waiting to get clearance back into China, it's a great city to get stuck in.
I'm hoping I get stuck in Seoul waiting to get clearance back into China, it's a great city to get stuck in.
What's going on in Ethiopia if you don't mind me asking?
My wife has work there as an engineer helping with their countries transportation. I'll still work for a company from China remotely and maybe look to help their Olympic teams through that.
Made it to Hong Kong for the first time this week. I was supposed to pit stop in Korea instead but my wife brought an expired UN passport, which brought some drama in Ethiopia. Fortunately Ethiopia does on site visas for Chinese passports. But we couldn't get a passport to Korea so rerouted to Hong Kong. It's my first time here, it seems like a fun place to visit and a terrible place to live. It's crazy expensive compared to the rest of China and the housing and standard of living is much lower than tier 1, 2, or 3 places in China. It feels like the rural areas in China besides how dense it is. But they have some cool looking areas, pretty good bars, and best of all much more open with COVID rules compared to mainland China at least as far as coming and going. Pretty good food but I can get the same food in a cleaner nicer city Shenzhen next to it for 1/4 the price. I can see why the young generation is so upset in Hong Kong. Oh plus they hardly use apps that are super convenient for things like paying and ordering and mostly still use cash which is annoying.
Addis Ababa was pretty nice. I spent most my time trying to find a house without success. I'm shocked how expensive housing is for how poor it is there. It's also really annoying that they only use cash and there largest bill is about $4. I'll attach a picture of me paying for a cell phone bill. People are really nice there. The food and coffee is great as expected. The weather is perfect, it's 70-75 in the day and 50ish at night year round. I was surprised how generally small people are compared to other places in Africa. I was there when the peace agreement happened which was nice and people were pretty happy about it.
Addis Ababa was pretty nice. I spent most my time trying to find a house without success. I'm shocked how expensive housing is for how poor it is there. It's also really annoying that they only use cash and there largest bill is about $4. I'll attach a picture of me paying for a cell phone bill. People are really nice there. The food and coffee is great as expected. The weather is perfect, it's 70-75 in the day and 50ish at night year round. I was surprised how generally small people are compared to other places in Africa. I was there when the peace agreement happened which was nice and people were pretty happy about it.
Damn I'd feel like a pimp laying down fat wads of cash like that everywhere I went.
There is plenty of petty theft in Addis Ababa. So I was feeling nervous withdrawing from the atm over and over again to get $200 and getting a crowd of people trying to sell me stuff or asking for money. I was just cramming wads of cash into every pocket. The poor employees are having to non stop count these stacks.
Pimpin' ain't easy...
Darkwing Duck
Well-Known Member
I had stacks like that when I lived in Korea.
Speaking of which my wife likes to get massages regularly so we were trying to find a decent one. Pretty much all of them were just HJ hutts. I was shocked how many there are. How many does the city need?
Crazy to see a city where a 3 bedroom apartment costs at least 3k and a lot of the houses are nice but around 5k a month. But most maids, drivers, or majority of service industry people earn about $100 a month. Such a huge wealth gap.
Where did you keep it? Wallets can't hold that.
Darkwing Duck
Well-Known Member
I don't remember. I think most fit in my wallet. Back then, the largest bill was the $10 equivalent, and I only went to the ATM every couple of months, so it was quite a few bills. I might have had an envelope?