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.