Flights are booked!

And thank god for that!
This is much needed progress and solidification of our trip plans.
I'll be flying out to Vancouver on Jan 7th, flying to Taiwan on Jan 15th, and flying back to Canada on May 27th. Will be a long escape from Canada and Winter! I wonder how quickly homesickness will come.

Booking flights and looking up restaurants

So I booked my first flight, which is my flight from Toronto to Vancouver. We're getting an updated quote on the main flights and are hoping to purchase tomorrow.
Residence applications have been sent in and now we just sit to hear about the residence app and visa application.


Maps
Been compiling a major map of tourist attractions in HK, Singapore and Taiwan. Found lots of well rated, cheap eats in HK! There are also a good number of fun weekend excursions that I can see in the various parts of Hong Kong and lots of temples for us to explore during our 5 days in Singapore!
Check out the map page for some of the locations that I've looked up!


Finances
Been looking into bank accounts for our time there. Seems the easiest method is to open an HSBC account when I get there and then to wire money into that account. Will have to pay a 2.5% conversion fee which is going to suck.


Cell phones
Was debating looking for a Samsung Galaxy SII for cheap when I get there but I may just continue using this Blackberry and get a prepaid data plan. With this I'm pretty sure I won't have BBM but the time difference to back home will make BBM much less useful anyways. The prepaid data plans seem pretty cheap and will allow me to navigate downtown with a GPS and help us not get lost! Currently look at http://www.three.com.hk and http://www2.pccwmobile.com.

Official Acceptance: Visa application time!

Ok so the official acceptance letter was ready for us at UW staring Tues Nov 1 2011. It took about a month to get a turnaround from HKUST. We 14 days to get the visa application back to HKUST (through mail) so it's hustle time! Melody helped me out by retrieving my package for me and scanning the time sensitive stuff to me so that's good! In the package seems to be the visa application, as well as residence application. Hustling to send the visa out by Thursday so that it will arrive in HK in time.

Lots of tasks to work on, mostly fun planning :)

Lots to do!

• Finish HKUST Application
• Find Plane Tickets
• Find a site (ASAPtickets.com) that has some cheap flights into Asia
• Plan out pre-classes vacation
• Hoping to go to Singapore, Vietnam, Korea, Malaysia and some others :)