China-1 (Shanghai)

Hey, welcome back. Today I'm going to talk about my visit to Shanghai, in China.
I arrived there on the 7th of January 2014, and went to the house of a friend, where I stayed while I was in the city.
Shanghai is a quite modern city, with a lot of skyscrapers and advanced buildings, but with less culture and history than Beijing, for example. That doesn't mean it has no culture at all, of course,  it still has some temples and traditional areas.
One of the most famous and important spots is the Bund, a place next to the river where you can see a lot of the big buildings of Shanghai, and where you can take a tunnel tour under the river, with light show included. Next to the Bund is Nanjing road, a very busy commercial road, which I also visited.

View from the Bund at night

The light tunnel

Nanjing Road

I visited one of the big buildings I was talking about, the Oriental Pearl Tower, which has a very peculiar shape, and used to be the tallest structure in the city, before being recently surpassed by other skyscrapers in the area.. On the bottom of the tower I visited the History Museum, which talks about the history of the city, very influenced by the Western world, to which Shanghai was forced to open its ports after the Opium Wars.

The Oriental Pearl Tower

Car exhibited at the History Museum

But, as I was saying, there is also some traditional chinese culture present in the city. In the Shanghai Museum, close to People's Square, one can find different expositions, about chinese calligraphy, sculpture, currency, clothing... I also visited Jinnang Temple (a Buddhist temple) and its surroundings, and the Old City, filled with traditional buildings.

The Shanghai Museum

Building in the Jinnang Temple

Decorations in the Old City for the Chinese New Year, which will be the year of the Horse

Other museums I visited where the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Shanghai Science and Technology Museum (filled with a lot of exhibitions, from minerals to robots to ecosystems to quantum mechanics...)

One of the artworks exhibited at the MOCA

Fossil from the Shanghai Museum of Science of Technology

Malaysia

Hello, and welcome back. In case you were wondering why I haven't written in quite some time, the reason is simple: blogger has been banned in China, where I stayed until yesterday, and that makes it a bit difficult to publish anything. But now that I'm in Japan, I can write again, so let's get down to business.
Me and my family arrived in Malaysia on the 1st of January, and left on the 7th (except for my brother, who left a day earlier). The difference is that I went to China, while they went home.
In Malaysia, we stayed in a hotel close to Kuala Lumpur right next to a theme park and to a mall. The park was very cool, with a lot of different attractions, such as water slides, roller coasters, zip wires, wave beach (where we surfed), even a horror zone with live actors.
The mall was nice too. Apart from the usual stuff (shops, restaurants, cinemas...), it also had an ice skating ring, which we tried out.
And we were joined there by two of the families that had taken me in during my travels, namely the ones from the Philippines and Thailand.
With so much in the same area, one might imagine that we never left it. But actually me and my youngest brother (along with the family from Thailand) went to Kuala Lumpur, where we visited the Central Market and saw the Twin Towers in the distance.

One of the entrances to the Central Market.

I think that the only problem with this place was the fact that I got sick (again...)

Vietnam

Hey, welcome back, today I'm going to talk about Vietnam. I arrived there on the 14th of December 2013 and left on the 1st of January 2014.
I arrived in Ho Chi Minh City first, where I met my family, as we were gonna spend Christmas and New Year together. In Ho Chi Minh City I visited buildings, monuments and museums, such as an opera house, a Nôtre-Dame Cathedral, a War Museum, a Buddhist temple, a Christian church and a market. The last three we visited while being driven around in a tricycle. Ho Chi Minh is nice, but I would have enjoyed it more if I hadn't gotten sick.

The opera house

The Nôtre-Dame Cathedral

A tank at the War Museum

My little brother on a tricycle 

The temple

The church

The market

After staying 3 days in Ho Chi Minh, we moved to Nha Thrang, where we stayed in a resort. It was quite nice (even though the beach was ridiculously small), and we stayed there the rest of the time in Vietnam, spending both Christmas and New Year's there.

Me and my little brother at the beach