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.