Day 3: First Day in Hong Kong!

Monday, April 17, 2017

          We made it! We are here in Hong Kong, we arrived at 7am on Monday, (we missed Easter Sunday). We safely got to our hotel, the GORGEOUSLY SPARKLY Shangri-La Kowloon!! It is so beautiful, chandeliers and art and marble and fountains everywhere!! So far my favorite part of Hong Kong. We had about 1 1/2 hours to settle into our rooms and eat, shower, etc. before we had to meet up at 10:30 to get our scavenges list!
          We got our list, and took the first 45 minutes to just look at everything and decide on some tasks we for sure wanted to do. Bill told us that the next time we all had to meet together was at 9pm tomorrow. So not tonight, but tomorrow. So we had some planning to do. The first thing we had to do was buy a travel guide book for us to actually understand what we were looking at, shocker. Actually, the real shocker was that it took us 2 HOURS to find a book! We looked everywhere, and we ended up buying it from this bookstore my family and I had gone to in Taiwan called Eslite. By this time it was past noon and I was not in the best mood.
          We decided to sit down at a McDonalds to ACTUALLY plan out what we were going to do for the rest of the day. We were there for about an hour and then we left to start our first scavenge, taking a ferry to Macau (the big, Asian Vegas) where we would do a bunch of different tasks. We walked to the terminal, ran to the ticket station and realized that we didn't have our passports with us. Which meant it was 1:30, we hadn't done ANY scavenges for the day, and if we were going to go to Macau we had to go back to our hotel, get our passports and then come back. At that point I really wasn't in the best mood, obviously neither was my dad.

Rickshaws and Starbucks

          But we are a team, this was our fault, and we were just going to get through it together and stay positive. So we went back to the hotel, got everything we needed, and took the ferry to Macau. When we had gotten to Macau we asked to see if we needed to buy our tickets then or right when we were leaving, the man at the station said to wait because there would be plenty of room. So we started our scavenging.

Sao Paolo Church

          We had to do 4 tasks in Macau in order to receive credit, so we decided to go to Sao Paolo Church, Portas do Cerco, Oceanus and Sofitel (casinos), and we had dinner at A Lorchas with Mike and Gillian (Team TSA Pre-check Yourself). At this time it was 7:45ish, and we were going to take the 8:30 ferry to Kowloon (where were staying).
          We get there, and the tickets are sold out! They're sold out for 8:30, 9:30 and 10:30. We asked them about going to HK Island at 10:30 where we could take a taxi back, all sold out. We were able to buy 2 tickets to a ferry that would take us to a pier on HK island. However, the ferry left at 12:30am!!!! We were both just EXHAUSTED. I was for sure very upset, mainly because I was tired, but also at the situation. Today was not at all like I thought it was going to be. A lot more bumps than I anticipated for the first day.
         So we just sat on the floor and napped until 12:30. We took the ferry to HK Island, and we had planned to do a couple things when we got there just to get some points and feel accomplished for the day. But of course it was 2 in the morning and everything was closed, except for taxis thank god. We were fortunate enough to have a very nice taxi driver who was willing to take us to visit a couple places for a little bit, and we even got a joke out of him! At 2:30am!!
          We got back to the hotel around 3am, we did some laundry, we showered, (I took a nice long shower because I smelled like smoke and fish) and now I'm writing this blog. So to sum up the day, it was A LOT harder than expected. We are very tired, and it's 4am. So until next time! ;)

Dad's View:

When you're an adult and you go on vacation, there's always mild-to-moderate pressure.  You have to decide where to go, what to do, where to stay, what "kind" of vacation, who to go with, how much to spend, what time of year.  all of these variables live along a spectrum where there is an optimal (for you) manifestation of it - best weather, best bargain, best experience, etc.  whether we want to or not, that creates - even for the most laid back (sic) of us - a sense of "oh i'd like to get this as right as possible."

as we landed in hong kong at 6:55 this morning, i marvelled at my complete and utter lack of expectation and feeling i described above.  there's no way to prepare for the locations - as a matter of fact, it's against the rules.  it's like you walked into school one day when you're a kid and they say "for the next semester you are NOT allowed to study for tests - studying is cheating."  that sense of liberation, of total freedom, of true in-the-moment enjoyment, is pretty awesome.

i haven't read sydney's accounts of the day, but suffice it to say that we have no place to go but up.  everything that could go wrong, did go wrong, and that was precisely the life-affirming, fun part of it all.  the *point* is to smile through it, keep going, let it slide off your back, adjust, and do what you can in the time you're given.  that's a pretty good analog for life, right?

the best part of yesterday was that now and forever after, i as a parent can look sydney in the eye and say "look, i know you think [X] is horrible and the end of the world, but you've been forced to sleep in a ferry station at night in macau... you can handle anything... this'll be fine."