Friday, March 24th (home)

As we drove to the Hong Kong airport that morning I tried to absorb as much as I could. My head was constantly out the window. When the bus stopped I grabbed my bag and went inside to wait for my ticket....

While waiting in line, I was entertained by this sign...

There was a slight bump while going through customs.... something about me "not having a record". But from what I gathered the problem was on their end, not mine.... or I just look so much like a friendly trustworthy teenager.... either way, they let me go after a few minutes. Next, we hopped onto our 15 hour flight headed to Newark. Obviously I did not get too many interesting pictures in those 15 hours, but I get this one of the moon over the tip of my wing:

Good to see you again, America!

Well thank you, I feel much more welcomed now....

Thankfully customs at Newark went much more smoothly. But we still had one more two hour flight to take to Boston. What seemed like a quick hop, really held us up! Once we got onto the plane the captain came over the loud speaker saying there was some "Malfunctions in the tower" and we would need to wait a few more minutes. "Malfunction" is a word you never want to hear at the airport, especially Newark. Two hours later we started to roll away from the gate.... along with twenty other planes that were also being held up.... as we took off I think I counted about 16 planes behind us.

To make up for the lost time, they went full throttle to Boston and got us there in about 50 minutes. In Boston it was about 8 PM, but I felt like it was 8 AM. Dazed, tired, and confused, I grabbed my luggage and got onto a Proctor mini-bus that took me home.

Thanks for reading my blog.

Thursday, March 23rd

Today I woke up for my last day on our tour. But no time for weeping, we had a busy day ahead of us! First, we jumped to another island with this boat:

Not.

But hey... at least we weren't not with this guy...

On our way across the water, we saw this building. Any of you seen The Dark Knight? This is the building Batman jumped out of and the plane took him away. Know the scene I'm talkin about? Anyways....

Once on the other island we were headed to a high peak where we could look over the city of Hong Kong. People used to take individual rickshaws up the mountain pulled by people. But renting 40 rickshaws to pull us up a mountain would not be so appeasing, so thankfully they installed a tram in 1888 for us.

This is the second oldest transfer station in Hong Kong, so they had a little history of the tram before you got on.

If you can not read that picture: "Hong Kong, May 30th, 1888.

The Peak tramway was running yesterday afternoon, when an opportunity for a free trip was afforded to all who chose to avail themselves of it. Needless to say, the number was large, and the novel means of locomotion excited great interest amongst the Chinese. The average time occupied by the trip was between ten and eleven minutes. Today the trams commence running according to the time table."

This was a very steep tram. Where this picture is taken, we are already at about a 30 degree angle.

And it only got steeper.....

Getting closer to the top though, we started to get a beautiful view of the city.

It was slightly overcast, but we still had a great view of everything.

A panoramic of the view:

After that we took a bus down the the other side of the mountain to Stanley Market, a very famous market in Hong Kong.

This outdoor market contained shop after shop of... well... STUFF. Although I did manage to buy two very nice cashmere scarfs for around 13 American dollars. (One cashmere scarf in the US is 30-50 dollars).

After we all roamed around the market and stocked up on presents for our family back home, we headed back into town to a small baptist church where we would perform that night.

The crowd that night was small. I was discouraged by this at first, but Kris made the point that this performance was the last night of our tour in China, and we should sing for ourselves, not for the crowd. I thought about the trip... where we were, and where we had come from. I thought about my ninja pose on The Great Wall, the amazing performance in Xi'an, singing with the Ningbo choir.... these things are now just memories in my head. Sure I have the pictures, but this does not add up to what I experienced. How privileged I am. How many other 18 year olds have been half way across the world?? I put my head on my pillow that night realizing this would be the last time for a long time, maybe ever, I would fall asleep in China. I slept soundly that night.

One more post to go.

Wednesday, March 22nd

Our plane left for Hong Kong at 8:15 AM, which means we needed to be at the airport at 6:15. Which means I was awake at 4:50. So the zombie version of me stumbled onto the bus and we were headed towards one of Shanghai's two airports by 5. Because Hong Kong is sorta-kinda-not really a part of China, we needed to go through customs at the airport. But that all went went smoothly.... what didn't go smoothly was that Michael, our beloved courier for the whole trip, would not be joining us in Hong Kong. We said goodbye to him before we went through security.

It was a brisk few hours to the island of Hong Kong!

First thing different about Hong Kong: Everyone is on the wrong side of the road!!

As we started to enter the heart of Hong Kong, we saw their famous shipping port. All of your "made in china" delicacies... a good chunk of them are shipped from here.

Dats a lot of boxes....

After we checked into the hotel Zack Lee's dad met us (who lives in Hong Kong) and took us to the greatest dinner experience I have ever had......

First we went down by the docks at the ocean which was about a 15 minute drive. Here, there were numerous tanks with different types of fish. Zack Lee's father told us the story of when he would go to the states and they would have signs at the grocery store saying "fresh fish!" But he would always says "How are they fresh? These fish are dead." THIS is fresh fish:

Shrimp and other assorted small ocean creatures...

This is called a Cuttlefish, but just think of it as a small squid.

Very giant crab....

So if you haven't already guessed it, we were here to select our dinner. First, they grabbed us some big netfuls of shrimp....

The rule "don't play with your food" doesn't apply here.

More dinner selections...

We grabbed a few of the cuttlefish too.... if you want to see it in action, I took a video of it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJqZavTz38M

Remember those shrimp you saw? Here they are!! To eat, first rip off the head, then peel of the legs, and then take of the skin. Once all this is done, you can enjoy some of the best shrimp you have ever had.

Remember the cuttlefish? Tada! Kind of weird to think I was looking at this thing squirming around 20 minutes ago....

And down it goes....

After having one of the best cultural experience I have had in a long time, we headed down to central Hong Kong to watch the famous light show. This light show is the biggest set up in the world.

As the 15 minute light show came to an end, I started to remember that tomorrow would be my last day in China.... well okay, Shanghai was technically my last day in "China", but you know what I mean.... I had experienced so much, it was hard to believe it was already almost over.

Tuesday, March 21st

We started out this foggy day by going to the bend where you can look at all the news parts of Shanghai. When someone says "Shanghai", this is probably the image you think of:

All of these buildings have been built in the last 20 years.

For those of you that have seen Mission Impossible 3, you maybe recognize the building on the right as the one Tom Cruise "jumps" from and the one of the left as the one he lands on!

After spending a little over an hour there getting all the pictures we could, we went to a garden that was built in the Ming Dynasty, finished in 1559. This garden is one of the last remains of ancient chinese architecture that you can see in Shanghai.

A creative wall in the garden:

After that we were released into a jungle of shops and stalls to buy food and whatever other nik naks we wanted.

Richichi chows down on a dumpling....

After that we went to the "Little Companion Theater" to rehearse for our performance that night.

The performance that night went very well. Our audience was very happy to listen to us. One older man shook my hand for what felt like several minutes with a huge smile on his face. It made me feel like I was really putting my effort to good use. All the work we had put into the songs, the work I had put into my solo song, I would do it all for the smile I saw on that mans face. Tomorrow we would get on a flight to Hong Kong.