China: Beijing to Hong Kong, PRC

We had to be on the bus to leave at 0430, an ungodly hour. I was thrilled to have bought a danish the night before. They gave us a boxed breakfast, which consisted of a sandwich, an egg, a roll, and an orange. The strangest assortment of food because there's no real meal for 0430.

The bus ride took us only 20 minutes. We were there by 0515. We were at the airport before anyone else and before any of the ticket agents or customs stations were open. Joy. At 0530 they openned and we got to our gate. None of the coffee places or food places openned til 0700 when our flight boarded. Fails.

We all scrunched our stuff into the overhead compartments and under our seats. As soon as I was seated in my window seat next to Carson and Michael I passed out for 2 hours. With a half hour left I woke up just in time for landing.

Getting everyone off the plane with all their luggage and through customs took forever. Once we gathered everyone we made our way to the buses. We had a new tour guide: Bruce. He gave us a half hour guided tour through Hong Kong to our port where the MV Explorer was docked.

There were mountains and islands and forests and tall buildings and bridges. Hong Kong really had it all. It was really pretty and I liked it already.

Everyone got back to the ship at the same time and it took about 45 minutes to get back on the ship through security.

I was so excited to see Nic, Becca, and Tania. I'd texted them to let them know I'd be back around 1300. Luckily they'd had a late night the night before and were in no hurry to get up and off the ship. I showered and dumped out all my stuff and we headed out with the boys. Our family was reunited.

We changed over our money from RMB to Hong Kong Dollars. Then we wandered around the city. The ship was docked right in a really nice and upscale mall, Ocean Terminal. We walked through the streets and looked in a few stores before we decided we needed to stop for a late lunch/early dinner. We went to the Spaghetti House. Such a good choice. We split garlic bread and got a few pitchers for the 8 of us. I had delicious meat sauce with spaghetti. Such a great choice. I've missed Italian. We all shared our stories from Beijing and other parts of China.

After our meal we split up. Becca, Tania, and I went shopping for outfits for our night out in Hong Kong. I bought a cute black turtleneck ish dress at the first store we went in. Becca and Tania also bought shirts. We shopped around for awhile. Most of the stores wouldn't let us try stuff on and most places that sold dresses were one size fits all. Weird. Also, we went into a Calvin Klein store and they only sell up to size C bras. So not America.

We got tired and headed back to the terminal. We looked for shoes or boots but couldn't find anything remotely within out budget. We looked at the French Connection. I was looking at a cute shirt. The salewoman came up to me and shook her head and pulled out a shirt 2 sizes bigger. Wow. What a bitch. I'd been debating between that and a size smaller. But she wouldn't let me try it on. So I went into the dressing room. Too big. Tania grabbed me the size I'd wanted and made a point of showing her this. I then asked her for the next smallest size, but they didn't have it.

This wasn't our first experience with the saleswomen laughing at us looking at their "one-size-fits-all" dresses. They wouldn't blatantly point and laugh. I find this so rude.

We exhausted ourselves shopping and headed back to the ship for a quick nap. We napped then got pretty to meet up with our boys at 2030.

We grabbed a quick dinner at McDonalds then took the ferry to the other side where all the bars were. We got some drinks at 7 11 and hung out for awhile. We hit the bars early. We just walked up and down the street. There were so many SAS people there. Becca met some men from Ghana. They were stoked we were gonna be heading there on our trip and bought us all drinks. It was a pretty good night. Everyone was out. We got kicked out of a few bars for not buying drinks. That's new. We were in a fairly empty bar dancing and they told us we couldn't be there if we weren't gonna buy drinks. Oh well.

The night was pretty early because 2 of our friends were too drunk. We took cabs back with them. Plus we all needed the extra sleep. We were all in bed by 0200.