A Week in Hong Kong

It's almost been a week now we've been in Hong Kong and alas, it's our last day before we leave for Xiamen.  Although it certainly has been eventful.

Almost every day we have had class first thing in the morning, either Chinese Language or Intercultural Communication, both of which have been very engaging thus far.  Afterwards, we hop on the Metro and head down town for rest of the day and find something else to see or do.

This actually was a decently spacious train car

Yesterday we went up to the Po Lin Buddha, which is the largest free standing Buddha statue in the world.  We took a long cable car ride up into the clouds to get there.  Most of the ride we peered through the fog to see the ground below, until eventually the statue was in sight.  It was actually good weather for a trip there because the fog made it that much more "mysterious" as some of us put it.  Here is a picture that attempts to show the scale of just how big this guy was.

A couple days prior we took a speed boat to Macau, which is considered to be the "Las Vegas of South East Asia." I was a little sceptic at first, but once nightfall, it all made sense.  Tons of nice cars everywhere and many many high stakes poker tables, which we didn't even think about getting near to.

While we were there we took some time to check out the more "culturally rich" parts of Macau, including the Ruins of St. Paul's Cathedral, and the fairly crowded streets leading up to it.

The night that was probably the most exciting yet was the one that consisted of nothing put exploring Hong Kong Island.  We started off making a trip to the Zoo at the top of this park way up in the hills.  Birds and Monkeys were most of what we saw, because by the time we got there it had began raining pretty heavily.  I actually began to enjoy the rain after a while, once I had gotten completely dowsed and accepted the fact that that was the way it was going to be.  Through the roughly 6 hours we spent walking around, we came through some interesting situations.  Just of one of those being "accidentally" finding ourselves on the 30th floor of the Hong Kong Grand Marriott, still dripping wet.  The view of the bay was spectacular, needless to say.  It eventually led us to see the light show from the opposite side of the bay before taking the ferry across and getting some more great pictures from the water.

I wish I could put everything I've seen up here, but I hope this gives a good idea of what's been going on here in Hong Kong for us this week.

Finally Made it!

This now marks my fourth cross-continental trip since arriving here.  We arrived in Hong Kong at about 8 in the morning after our 15 hour flight from LA, meaning that we had to stay up all day before we could even lay down, or else the jet-lag would have been even worse.  It was quite difficult and so may of our conversations were quite ridiculous towards the end of the day by how delirious we were all getting.  I found it to be pretty amusing.

We are staying at the Wu Kai Sha YMCA Youth Village here in Hong Kong, a humble little place with "Bungalows" for us to lodge in, a nice sized central cafeteria, and a set of classrooms that are used for and by various groups and reasons.  We'll be here for the first week or so of our trip before we head off for Xiamen to stay at our University.  In the meantime, we have already started our classes on Chinese, I have  enjoyed them.

Here is most of our group standing on the shore of the Kowloon District, right across from Hong Kong Island.  This picture was taken yesterday, on our "first" real day together. At this point we had already been together through our whole flight and journey and already had began bonding pretty quickly, I feel at least.  I can already tell that we are gonna have a lot of fun together and I'm so excited for what we'll be doing together.

It's almost 5 o'clock in the afternoon and it happens to be Janelle's birthday, so we are about to hop on the rail system to head to down-town and celebrate (I hear there is an awesome laser light show nightly by the bay)!