Hong Kong (very late...)

Here we go. I wrote some of this a long time ago, and now I’m just finishing it up:

Apparently I haven’t posted anything as far as the actual journey goes in a really long time. Back in Hong Kong (which feels like forever ago), I only had one day there, and of course I went to Hong Kong Disney. I wasn’t planning on it because I didn’t want to spend my one day in Hong Kong at Disneyland, but it was pretty close to the ship and it didn’t cost too much, so I went for part of the day. It was eerie. It has practically the same layout as Disneyland back home. Once you purchase your ticket and walk under the train tracks, there’s Main Street. Fire Station, Magic shop, and everything. It was the first “familiar” place I had seen in months, but it didn’t seem right. I’m in Hong Kong, not California! It felt like another dimension or a ghost town or something supernatural and in Chinese. Once you wandered deeper into the park, it started to become less familiar. It was much smaller, and the rides weren’t all the same. They had Space Mountain, Astro Blaster, and the Jungle Cruise. Those were the only rides that were the “same” as Disney in California. Space mountain was kind of cool, but the one in California was better. The best ride they had was by far the Jungle Cruise. As soon as you walked up to it, there were three different lines, one for each language they offered. I want to say they had English, Cantonese, and Mandarin, but Japanese might have been thrown in there somewhere. Everybody who has been on the jungle cruise knows about the inordinate amount of lame jokes they throw in there, right? Well it’s a million times better when it’s told in “Engrish”. Our guide wasn’t quite fluent. Every time she tried to make a joke, she really had to make a huge effort to remember what words to say. It took so long that it was almost painful waiting for her to deliver the punch line. She did the joke about the spiders that jump 15 feet, but it’s safe because the boat is only 10 feet away from the spider. By the time the punchline came, I think the spiders were long gone. For the majority of the cruise, the girl didn’t even bother to tell jokes. She was just overly hyper and started yelling in Chinese at the different animals that were attacking her boat. It. Was. Hilarious. I can’t even explain it, it was so funny.

Not much else was accomplished in Hong Kong. I really wanted to try and find some floating restaurants to have dinner at, but they were pretty far away from the ship and nobody I was with felt like venturing that far away to eat. We also didn’t want to miss the laser light show that happens every night on the water. I don’t know if it was just because of the weather, but I wasn’t really that impressed. It was pretty foggy that night, so we couldn’t see a lot of the lasers, but it was still pretty neat that a city puts on something like that every night. The rest of the night was pretty uneventful. I went to a night market and bought a few souvenirs from Hong Kong, but I didn’t want to stay out too late because my Beijing trip to Tsinghua University was the following morning. This was the big trip I had been waiting for, and I wanted to be ready for it.

More later!