A Day in Kowloon

Saturday, February 18, 2006

Today we met up with Joann our guide in the airport, and three other arriving families. The Theis Family, the Epstein’s and a member from 912 whose name escapes me at the moment. The Epstein’s have their mom Mary and 2 year old daughter Maya with them.
We got on our little shuttle bus and drove through Hong Kong and over some major suspension bridges like I’ve never seen before, amazing! The harbor traffic was also incredible, as were the heighth of the apartment/condo buildings. Joann was telling us that the average family who owns a condo pays 350k for it and it is about 500 square feet. The kitchen is so small that families eat dinner out every night. That is why there is a huge restaurant business in Hong Kong.

We arrived at the Regal Kowloon and at that time we met another travel group member, Cindy Theriot. Her husband couldn’t make the trip and her friend is arriving tomorrow.

We were told “do not sleep today!” I think we we were going to be fine because we had slept a good nights sleep last night and most people arriving looked bleary eyed, and Mark and decided they probably weren’t going to make it long. Oh, and we found out that Brian Rosenbalm was very sick on their plane, before take off so they didn’t make the trip. I hope we’ll find out what happened more today, and that they can somehow catch up. Prayers going their way for sure from our travel group!!

After checking in and getting settled a little we called Austin and Grandma on Skype for about 30 minutes. The connection was great, it was wonderful to hear everyone’s voices, I think I even heard my sister in the background. Best of all, it was free and I suggest it’s use to anyone who is coming this way and is leaving kids at home!! We then forged out into Kowloon. We went first to the Hong Kong History museum which was just amazing. A wonderful museum with great exhibits on the culture of Hong Kong and China. We were able to watch a couple of the small shows in English and were impressed with how very nice everyone is. After the history museum we took in the Science Museum right across the way. (Both entrance fees came to less then $7.00 US for both of us. Austin would have LOVED the science museum. There were many things to to and see and play with. We had fun, but I was HOT. Mark layed on a bed of nails, and it was really neat! One thing we missed was they have this rollercoaster thing with balls and it’s huge like 3 stories. Well, it wasn’t working but we would have liked to see it. We took vision tests: mine 20/20, Mark’s questionable because lthe lady said he cheated! Haha!

We came back to the hotel (didn’t lay down for a rest) for a couple hours. Mark watched the Olympics in Chinese and was cheering and everything. I uploaded some pictures to our blog via Flickr. We met Leslie and Wayne Kullman in the hall and that was fun!

At about 5pm, I started to hit a wall where I felt like I was going to die if we stayed in the room another minute, so we went out and met up with Aimee and Phil Nance. They’ve been here since Tuesday so they are the real experts of Kowloon. We walked up to Nathan Street with everyone trying to sell us fake Rolex watches. “Good copy watch, you buy, excellent deal”. We ended up at TGIFridays for dinner and Aimee said it was the best meal she’d had yet. We walked back to the hoel along the waterfront and watched the laser light show on all of he skyscrapers, it was beautiful, but also not as nice as we thought it would be…..

Well, it’s 3:30am, and I’m going to try to get some more sleep. I’ve had about 7 hours and my body is saying “Wake up, it’s noon”. But it’s not!