Asiatrip: Cost breakdown After Asiatrip ended, we got back to MIT and immediately got hosed beyond belief. As such, we only just finally figured out our finances. I did a bit more number crunching, because I wanted to figure out my total spending and where all the money went. This is a rough per-person cost breakdown of our ...

Asiatrip publicity and link dump I spent about a day exploring China’s parallel universe internet.  The fact that Weibo looks almost identical to Twitter and that RenRen looks almost like Facebook definitely made the parallel universe easier to explore. But everything being in Chinese is still discombobulating. I had been looking for a way to improve my technical Chinese (as ...

Summary: Asiatrip Who Four MIT engineering undergrads, interested in just about everything, took our summer savings and threw it at Asia on a grand 2-week long Asiatrip in an effort to expand our horizons. We came back with so much more. Nancy Ouyang, the mastermind of this journey, nyancat hacker, hexapod enthusiast, secretary of MIT makerspace MITERS.  She was ...

Day 16: Asakusa, NPT to DTW to BOS This is the last day of our journey through Asia! Japan reminds me a lot of Las Vegas, with its glamour, its adult content.. and its horse race betting? I walked around Asakusa (where we stayed) a bit in the morning. We stayed right next to a Buddhist (I think) temple and streets lined with little vendors. ...

Day 15: Capsule hotel, Akihabara, Shibuya I’ll admit it was inane, but I insisted on finding a bookstore in order to find a common Japanese phrase book, so we found one before heading off anywhere else. Turns out, Japanese bookstores don’t sell those. They do have books for learning other languages though, including a lot of neat Chinese-Japanese books, an appropriate ...

Day 14: PEK to NRT, toilets, Tokyo Hackerspace Magically, we got on standby to the flight from Beijing to Tokyo. Earlier, they told us it was pretty much impossible because they switched out the normal plane with a smaller one and were thus having weight issues. The Seattle flight looked terrible too (as collateral damage). But magically, everything worked out. At this point ...

Day 13: Great Wall, Ming Tombs, Summer Palace, Peking Duck I thought I was all caught up with writing, but realized last night that I missed writing about Day 13. Oops. Well here it is, and the last 3 days will follow. Our second day in Beijing was designated as one of our touristy days.  With Nancy’s family friend as our guide, we adventured through the ...