trip to Kuala Lumpur and Beijing - the lead-up

I managed to get two weeks off between jobs so I decided to make good on my free time. I mean, ever since I finished Uni, I never had a decent holiday or break. Certainly not anything more than a couple of weeks. So about a week into my severance period (typical 4 week thing) I strolled into a Flight Centre in the Melbourne CBD and started asking about flights and accommodation. I worked out that I wanted to go back to Kuala Lumpur for a few days. I specifically wanted to be around Sunway resort. I've been there before on a previous company trip (for training!) and I have a number of cousins staying in the area. I was hoping to catch-up with them and to basically relax and eat the local food.

A little while before I decided to resign, I had a chat with a good friend who's now residing in Beijing. He was back in Australia for a few weeks for a small holiday and he's since gone back to Beijing for work. So I organised to visit him during the China leg of my trip. It would be a good way to visit Beijing since I don't know many people from there, and my Mandarin really sucks, so getting around could be a real problem.

So the itinerary came out to be 4 days in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and 6 days in Beijing, China. I had my flights and accommodation booked on the same day I went to the Flight Centre to inquire about my holiday plans (they work fast! I was very impressed). I also needed to get a Chinese holiday visa and I had Flight Centre arrange that for me as well. There's now a nice-looking visa stuck in my passport.

I also picked up a nice new shiny digital point-and-shoot camera - the Canon IXUS 950 IS. It is a sweet little 8MP camera with an optical image stabiliser. The image stabiliser does wonders for night shots and taking video. It's not a miracle-worker; some effort still needs to be taken into holding the camera as still as possible. I also picked up a Sandisk Ultra II SD card and set the camera to M2 or 2048x1536 resolution. It's an 8MP camera but at that setting I could only take 380 odd shots; versus 1150 odd shots at M2 resolution. It's not like I'm printing my photos in A3 anyways.

I had everything organised one week before my final day on Friday August 17th. I would, in fact, depart on the 17th at night - or rather, early Saturday morning on the 18th. I had Flight Center work out the flights to be at night to save as much time as possible. All that was left to be done was to serve out the remainder of my severance period, and to pack my luggage.