Reddit mentions: The best asia travel books

(Part 2)

—

It was an armed exodus of millions, and the Five passed their marching columns on the way to Berlin, and some soldiers took potshots at them with their pistols, but the Five just swatted the bullets away like mosquitos. Some soldiers wondered aloud what the point of following Hitler was anymore.

—

Panzers stood arrayed against them blasting, pounding away, but the Five just ran through the hail of whistling howling shells, darting into the rococo canyons that were Berlin, each palace built like a giant layer cake, until they came to Wilhelmstraße No. 77, the Reich Chancellery, where Hitler was standing alone, waiting for them along the vast windows of the ball room at the front of the building—the Festsaal mit Wintergarten, the Nazi Empire's heart.

"Your reign of terror is over," a disheveled Elsa says between her gasps, catching her breath. "Mein Furhrer."

"Who the hell are you?" he says, squinting.

"My name is Elsa Schneider," she says. "First Empress of the World. Now bow down, Mein Furhrer, and relinquish all your lands to me."

Indiana raises a pistol and points it at Adolph Hitler. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but you'd better do what she says. Elsa doesn't screw around."

"Well, she did with ush, Junior," Henry Jones says.

Hitler looks at them, looks at the gun, and then gets down on one knee.

"Lower," Elsa says.

Two knees.

"Lower!" she yells.

He bows down on his knees and his wrists.

"All the way," Elsa says.

Hitler genuflects on his forehead, stretching his arms forward, lying on his chest, his belly, stretching his legs back, the toes of his boots flat on the floor.

"All hail Empress Schneider," Hitler says into the hardwood tiles.

She smiles. "Now let's get some cameras, some microphones, some radios and reporters, whatever we need—the time has come to announce our intentions to the world."

Indiana looks at her, grins, and laughs.

—

The Nazi exodus turned back and tried and failed to save their beloved Furhrer, whom Elsa chained to a collar and walked wherever she went like one of his German shepherds. The Russians took a crack at her—followed by the British, the Americans, and everyone who believed in liberty. Elaborate plans were hatched. Nazi generals, Russian generals, British and French generals, even American generals, all met together in the same room, greeted each other awkwardly, and eventually found themselves yelling at each other and pounding their fists on maps and threatening to strangle one another before finally hatching an elaborate plan—get the Five drunk, chain them up, put them in a large box, and send them to the bottom of the ocean.

"Well golly," General MacArthur says. "It's so stupid it can't possibly fail. Now let's shake on it."

"What about after we succeed?" Marshall Zhukov says. "Are we merely to return to our previous conflict?"

"Sounds like a plan to me," Erwin Rommel says, rubbing his hands.

—

Just after the Empress chose a new emblem for her worldwide empire—the Earth impaled by a vertical sword—her husband, Royal Consort Jones, sporting a new black goatee, takes her hand, surrounded by hundreds of smiling bowing admirers dressed in white gowns and black tuxedos to celebrate eternal peace and prosperity—and they dance together in the Reichskanzlei ballroom, whirling to the swelling strains of music sawed on innumerable violins, the best musicians collected from the best bands across the planet. Everything is perfect. All are clapping, cheerful, happy, smiling, in the gleaming glitz, the flashing cameras.

After a lull in the festivities a waiter who suspiciously resembles Winston Churchill hands Elsa and Indiana glasses of champaign from a silver platter. He does the same for Sallah, Henry Jones, and Marcus Brody, and the Five are all so drunk on unbelievable success that something so simple as a sleeping potion sprinkled into sparkling alcohol undoes them.

They awaken in a dark metal prison cell, and they scream and punch each other and curse their fate, claw at the walls, but it's no use—there's no exit, and they can hear water outside, the bubbling sounds of the sea, shark fins foaming in the deep, even an occasional groaning whale. Deep distant faraway thumps inform them that the war has resumed, even after they run out of oxygen, and gasp for breath and clutch at their throats for years without ever dying.

"This was such a stupid idea, Elsa!" Indiana growls. "I should have just let you go!"

She spits in his face in the dark. "And I wish I had let go and fallen into that chasm! How could God do this? Why, Lord, have you forsaken us?"

—

The world did indeed resume the conflict, and everyone who knew anything about the Five agreed never to speak about them again. Records were destroyed, and each side acted as though nothing had ever changed. The film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is actually a documentary of these events—though because they were so well covered-up, no one takes any of it seriously.

—

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You are arriving at a nice time of year. I recommend getting a guide such as this one, which will help you to navigate through all the red tape once you get here. Good luck with the move!

I recommend buying a guidebook such as this. It has all the interesting things to see and do, plus maps, info on getting around, etc. Then if you have any specific questions not covered in the guide, you are welcome to ask them here.

When you live on less than $1 a day, £400 is quite a lot !

But hey, Everybody Loves a Good Drought

Good questions! I'd like to know the answers to these as well since I plan on doing the same exact thing at the beginning of 2013. I know for hostels you can look at www.hostelworld.com, www.hostelbookers.com, or www.hostels.com.

Edit: I believe this is one of the more popular books on the subject. It's geared towards people on a low budget (students mostly) and is pretty comprehensive. I ordered the 2013 edition but if you're planning on going in a couple months the 2012 one should be sufficient.

http://www.thai-language.com/

and try find a copy of the 'Bar Guide' it's big fun and very useful :D

http://www.amazon.co.uk/English-Thai-Bar-Guide-Mark-Reynolds-ebook/dp/B005EMM8EK

In English only Oman guide by Bradt guides but good reviews
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Oman-Bradt-Travel-Guides-Walsh/dp/1784770205/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

Seems the spirits make good coin for farangs too £352.63 for a book ?
[Thailand: Into the Spirit World] (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Thailand-Spirit-World-Marlene-Guelden/dp/9812041109/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376138910&sr=1-1)

Kamakura is an easy day trip from Tokyo so no need to stay overnight.

If you do go to Kamakura invest a penny in this superb guidebook to the area. It's a few decades old but the temples haven't changed too much since the 70s :-)
http://www.amazon.com/Exploring-Kamakura-Guide-Curious-Traveler/dp/0834801442/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

try this: http://www.amazon.com/The-Smile-Murugan-Indian-Journey/dp/0719564050

I also live in Korea--I'm a white half Jewish guy married to a Korean with a mixed-race son--and I want to describe the experience of living in a country with such absurdly high population density, since I think that this is more important than the various cultural factors working against procreation in East Asia. I was raised in New York City but spent most of my life in New England.

So. You're at home in Korea. It's Sunday morning. Want to go hang out somewhere with your s/o? Let's head to the river. You walk outside, and there are people everywhere. If you take the subway, it'll be so crowded inside the cars you might have to wait for the next one to come along. If you want to drive or take a bus, you can expect to wait on a huge eight-lane highway in idling traffic regardless of where you want to go. The cafes are full. There are lines outside all of the restaurants, and if you manage to sit down at a table you'll be surrounded by talking eating people who have few qualms about staring at you or commenting on whatever stands out about you (even if you yourself are Korean). If you manage to get to the river, you'll have to contend with people riding their bikes in random lanes, people walking on the wrong side of the path, and other various annoyances.

Faced with all of these obstacles, you two decide to just go for a walk. You have trouble navigating the sidewalks (when there are sidewalks) because, as I said, there are people (mostly old grumpy people) everywhere, and it's impossible to walk for a minute without bumping into someone, without having to stop and wait, without having to change directions. Don't forget to watch out for the motorcycles zooming along through the crowds. Crossing the street also takes time. You spend a lot of time, in fact, waiting for lights to change, as though the entire country is giant factory, instead of a warm comfortable pleasant place to live.

Conversing on the sidewalk with your s/o is difficult: everyone is listening, and besides, what are you even going to talk about? All of the shops are more or less the same, too--a cellphone store, a computer repair place, a noraebang (or private karaoke room), a convenience store, a Korean restaurant, a crappy western restaurant, a fast food place, a cafe, a small grocery store, a car repair place, a bar specializing in world famous Korean beer, various cram schools, and apartments and office buildings, repeated endlessly, in every direction.

The number of unique or quality institutions in a given Korean megalopolis could fit on a single city block, but they're usually spread out all over the place; moving from one end of town to the other can take hours, unless you have a helicopter. There are few parks, and all of them are jam-packed on a Sunday. There is little variety in this country. The businesses, the banks, and the government, are all in the hands of the old people, who very literally had whatever creativity they possessed beaten out of them by their teachers in grade school. It's a crowded place, and you have to conform.

So you get kind of tired after walking around aimlessly with nothing to do and nowhere to go, and decide to head home to your massive cement apartment building, which was constructed in the middle of a forest of massive cement apartment buildings. Don't forget your address, because they all look exactly the same. You don't feel like walking up thirty flights of stairs, so you wait for the elevator, but it takes forever to come down since so many people are using it.

Once you get back to your room you can't think of anything to do with your free time because you spent most of your life studying or following orders, so you decide to turn on the TV to watch any one of the most popular comedy shows in the country: each is somewhat like Whose Line Is It Anyway, with extra wacky sound effects, random computer animation, and relentless bubbly subtitles. It's all improv, all the time, unless you want to watch one of the formulaic soap operas or yet another documentary featuring old men talking about Chinese calligraphy or old women discussing the delicious food they grow on their farms. In Korea.

Given these factors and choices, it's no surprise to me that the population here is decreasing: there are too many people. I personally don't think Koreans have much of a problem finding people to date (I work at a university and I see couples all over the place), but I do know that they aren't interested in dealing with the burden of raising children. It's expensive, it's difficult, and as other posters have mentioned, there are thousands of other hardworking children (and their relentlessly bored and ambitious unemployed tiger mothers) to compete with: although abortions are illegal here, my wife has a friend who seems to prefer this method of birth control over all others, having done so five times. I doubt her case is uncommon.

tl;dr: There are simply too many people in East Asia, and I don't think anything can solve that problem until you can go outside without having to duke it out with thousands of random strangers on a Sunday morning.

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