'I' On Malaysia

Having had a few days suffering from a dose of flu, I wasn’t able to continue my posts about the Shanghai 2010 Transformers Cybertron Con until now.  I’m still not 100% recovered which must make this one of the longest lasting flu I’ve had in forever even if it wasn’t the one with the worst symptoms.

Perhaps the second or third port of call for anyone visiting the 2010 Transformers Cybertron Con currently running in Shanghai is the display area which showcases collections brought in by members of the ACToys forum and other collectors across China along with some items from Hasbro and TakaraTomy themselves including upcoming releases in the Celebration 2010 line such as Unicron, Primus and Masterpiece Rodimus – all of which will be posted in a separate entry later on.

Earlier this month, Toys’R'Us Malaysia (and other countries in the region) were running a competition to win a trip to the Cybertron Con 2010 being held from July 30th to August 3rd in Shanghai.  All you had to do was spend RM100 for an entry and write down a slogan finishing the sentence ‘I love Transformers because…’ in no more than 15 words.

The last day of touring before heading to Shanghai for some, well, shopping and dumplings – is in Hangzhou.  Home to a large lake, lots of temples and a huge tea plantations…

The day got off to a bit of a cold and gloomy start so we were all wrapped up in our woolliest attire, and the scenery was all wrapped up in its cloudiest attire too.  Temples on the hillsides that would normally make for good photo opportunities just looked like temple shaped silhouettes in a black and white picture.  Pictures taken of West Lake didn’t come out much better either – the boat ride on the lake that we started off with was also cut short for some reason too, so Hangzhou wasn’t looking all that promising.

The tour of Suzhou continued on the second day of our trip with visits to Tiger Hill and the ‘Leaning Tower of China’ or Yunyan Pagoda.  This leaning tower is older than the more famous Leaning Tower of Pisa though and has a lot of history surrounding it, much more than Pisa.  Having said that, the tower itself wasn’t all that impressive and I much preferred the scenery surrounding the tower than I did the tower itself and taking pictures of the surroundings with the tower in the background makes for much better visuals in my opinion.

A few months ago, Wendy’s family invited me to go to Shanghai with them over Xmas and into the New Year (which I ended up calling a ‘Chinese New Year’), with a few days to travel around some scenic areas called Suzhou and Hangzhou to see places like the water village and gardens.  After sorting out visas and changing schedules to cut the flight prices down by RM600 per person (by flying down to Singapore instead of directly to China, believe it or not), the day arrived for us to head off to the land where fake is normal and everything has an association to the colour red.