Whirlwind

I feel like so much has happened since I last posted, I am not sure where to begin.

Hong Kong greeted us on Friday night with pretty bad thunder storms. Instead of partying for our last night of the tour, we found a quiet restaurant nearby and enjoyed good conversation and great food. Eric had us all pick names out of a hat and come up with awards to give that person for our farewell memory of the group. I knew I would get picked on for my fussy eating and was not disappointed. :-) Krista gave me the award, a pack of Oreos and a CD of Chinese music (meow mix), for the Most Difficult To Feed In China. Anyone who knows me knows how deserving I am of such an honor! I loved it and I already ate the Oreos.

We stayed on the Kowloon side of HK and only had Saturday to go to Hong Kong Island (which is much nicer than Kowloon). Kowloon is NY/Las Vegas while HK Island is more like San Francisco. Rather than run around like bandits trying to see everything, we picked one thing. We did the tourist pilgrimage up the tram to Victoria Peak to get the aerial view of the city. It was cool, but the haze following the rains did not make for great photos. Mental note - this is not a good time of year for China. I suspect fall/winter would be much better. In any event, I don't feel like I missed much. At a certain point, tall buildings and Buddhas lose their novelty.

Trey and I parted ways Sunday morning in HK. He went home and I returned to Beijing to start the next tour -- the train journey to Russia. The haze in Beijing is worse than when we were here 3 weeks ago. I wish I could call it a marine layer, akin to those that blanket Los Angeles, but, since Beijing is inland, I have to acknowledge that I am breathing in a boatload of pollution. My new tour group went to the Great Wall today, but I excused myself from the activities to get some errands done. Do I sound like a snob when I say "been there done that" about the Great Wall of China? :-)

The new tour group is quite a contrast with the last group. My estimate is that the oldest person in the last group may have been 40 and I think the youngest was 18. On this group, I am the youngest, there is an English guy who is also traveling alone who is 6 months older than I and everyone else is at least 55, if not in their 60's. We had a good spread of nationalities on the last trip, but I am the only American on this one, there are 3 Brits, 2 Kiwis (New Zealanders) and the remainder of the 12 are Australian. Our guide appears to be my age. Another Canadian who speaks Chinese. I am more and more impressed with the Canadians by the day. :-)

We catch the train to Ulaan Bataar, Mongolia on Wednesday morning. It's going to be a 28-hour journey. I bought more books in HK though, so I am excited at having so much down time to get back to reading.