Howdy from China!!!!

First off, I am super excited that at about 3:30 Wednesday night/Thursday morning Jeff and I were still up and I realized I should bookmark the "change language" screen on on Blogger. I am so glad I did as when I pulled up the regular screen to post from the hotel room I couldn't read a word of it. :-) But no worries, I seem to be up and running.

On the way over to China, we somehow skipped night and went straight from Thursday morning to Friday afternoon. We flew west and so we never saw any nightfall...just bright and sunny the entire trip. We left our house at 5:30 a.m. and didn't arrive at our hotel until 6:30 Thursday evening. If you take the time change into account we were traveling for exactly 24 hours. And yes, it did feel like 24 hours...actually a bit more. :-) The best part was on the flight from Chicago to Hong Kong...there was a screen that showed our plane flying around the globe. It said that we had traveled 130 miles....and then it showed that we had about 7,900 left to go....ouch. At that point I decided maybe it be best that I stop watching the guide when it came up.

We sat next to a very nice gentleman on the flight over. He and his wife are professors at an American University and he is from Nanchang originally (where we are headed next to get Isabel). The funniest part is when he asked where we were headed and I said Nanchang (pronounced it just like it looks). And he and his wife had to try and figure out what I was saying. Ends up we had to spell it out as I am obviously completely butchering the name with my Kansas twang. I still can't say it correctly... :-(

They showed a ton of in flight movies...most of which I really wanted to see. Of course, I seemed to fade in and out of a sleeping-drug-induced fog/nap and never really saw any of them all the way through....but I can ruin the endings for you if you want!

We landed in Hong Kong and met up with some of the other people in our travel group. They are all very nice people and I am looking forward to spending the next couple weeks with them. Our agency had two guides meet us at the airport (Matthew and Joey) and they took us via bus to our hotel. It was about an hour ride and Joey gave us all sorts of information about the next days here in Hong Kong. I tried to take a couple photos from the bus....not the best, but gives you an idea of what we saw.

We got signed in at the hotel, freshened up and then had the evening on our own. Jeff and I decided to be brave and take a shuttle bus to a large shopping plaza about 10 minutes from our hotel. We figured more people from our group would do the same. Joey had told us about it on the bus ride and said we could find places to eat and shop. It ended up that only one other person , Ann, went with us. It was so crazy...it was a little before 9:00 by the time we left and the place was packed! Many of the signs and ads were also in English, so it wasn't hard to get around. It was just like many malls back home, except much larger and a lot more stores with electronic items for sale.

As we hadn't yet had dinner we decided to find a place to eat. Since we felt like it was 8:30 in the morning instead of evening, we didn't feel much like dinner but knew we needed something. We tried a restaurant called Tea and Chocolate (yummm....and yes, it DID serve stuff other than tea and chocolate). However, as we sat down and started looking through the menu, the kitchen staff changed and they were no longer offering many of the items on the menu. The remaining items were not really what we had in mind to eat, so we decided to just walk around a bit more. We ended up eating at a small cafe where we just grabbed a bagel and some cream cheese. Perfect light bite and fitting with the schedule our bodies still thought they were on. We had changed money at the hotel before we headed out as most places in Hong Kong prefer the HKD for payment. It takes a bit of getting used to just handing over random bills and getting odd looking change back. :-)

We grabbed a taxi for the ride to the hotel. None of the taxi drivers speak English, so our guide had given us a card stating the name of our hotel I just pointed and he nodded. We all three got into the back of the car and hoped we would end up at the right place. It didn't take but a couple minutes and we were back at our hotel.

It is about 9:45 p.m. here and Jeff and I are pooped. We have tried to stay up as long as we can so we quickly adjust to the time change. But I think we are calling it a night. Tomorrow we are on our own until noon. We will meet up with our guides again and go on a tour of Hong Kong. I didn't take our camera to the mall tonight, but I will take it tomorrow and try to load some more pictures tomorrow night.

We miss all of you terribly. It was heartwarming to read all your comments. Although we have only been gone a short while, it truly does feel like we are a world away from everyone....yet so much closer to Isabel.

Arriving in Hong Kong:

View from Bus:

Views from Room:



Jeff was quick to spot this bike shop: