Southeast Asia

Well, headed off for another big trip this weekend. The itinerary this time includes; Hong Kong, Hanoi and Halong Bay in Vietnam, Bangkok and Phuket in Thailand and Shanghai and Beijing in China. Becky is on board for this trip again and we have made it further than we did last year without injury. If you will recall, she unfortunately broke her ankle the weekend before we were supposed to leave for Russia and was not able to go. We are heading to SE Asia at the end of the rainy season, so we may have some showers but they are supposed to be sporadic and in between sunny periods. I'm very excited to see the Great Wall, the Forbidden City and Halong Bay in Vietnam. We are taking a boat trip for the night in Halong Bay. Overall, we will fly almost 20K miles in about 16 days. Lots of moving but at least we are going to Phuket for a few days to hang out on the beach. It will be a vacation within a vacation.
I went to Travelex today to have some currency when I land in Hong Kong for the cab. They didn't have any Hong Kong dollars but they did have some Chinese Yuan and when I asked for Thai money, they said they had that too. So I get home and I start looking at the money and it doesn't look Thai at all. I can't read or speak any Thai, but I know it has those loopy looking characters http://www.simply-thai.com/thailand-pages-images/Thailand_page_Thai_Alphabet_thai_cons.gif and the currency I got had more Asian looking Chinese type characters. Thus began a two hour process of trying to determine what kind of money it was. I couldn't find any matching images anywhere and there wasn't a single English character anywhere, which is strange as most have some English on them. I couldn't believe I couldn't figure it out. I looked up the currency on most SE Asian countries, a process that was a little harder than I thought it would be, Google Fail!! So I start looking at the currency closer, don't recognize any of the buildings, the people or any other characteristics. I finally figured it out when I looked at the 500 note. Can you figure it out? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NT500-2000.png
Anyways, we leave Saturday morning for a 15.5 hour flight, sweet...