Things couldn’t have worked out better. So many things have just fallen in place, convincing me more and more this is really what I should be doing. Up until we were in the airplane I honestly could not believe I was really doing this. After a 15 min. drive in the plane down the runway, we finally took off from LAX and realizing there was no going back now! 14 hours went by surprisingly fast with the sweet entertainment system on our Chinese flight! Music, games, live outside camera, movies and more we could use at our convenience-it was LEGIT! Watching Letters to Juliet got me thinking about love, something I will be thinking about a lot at the orphanage. I saw my first lightning storm from a plane and it was truly…striking J After a few banana cakes for breakfast we landed in Hong Kong to another realization—we’re half-way around the world! In our 14 hour layover we decided to visit Lantau island, Hong Kong’s largest island which holds the world’s tallest, outdoor, seated bronze Buddha(pic above) located in Ngong Ping village. Getting in at 5:50 a.m. we had to wander until things opened and found a huge grocery store with an entire wall of oil! Hmm…I wonder what they use a lot of in their cooking here J We planned to take a tour to this Buddha from the airport as neither of us are experienced in travelling in countries where you don’t know ANY of their language and…we didn’t really know where we were going. However, we were skilled enough to not be able to find the tour, so ended up just taking a bus to and from the gondola, saving about $15 each, yes! Now I love gondolas. But this gondola ride was especially awesome. It was about 25 min. each way up this lush humid hill to the Giant Buddha, and they even had gondolas with glass bottoms! Also by the Buddha is the Po Lin Monastery where we found people burning incense, worshipping, and a monk chanting and bonging a bell (I wish I knew what it all meant). We noticed these red blow-up bunnies with wings on them hanging all over the village up there(pic above) so we finally asked what they were for. The vague idea we got was they were for a festival on September 22 celebrating this man and woman getting back together. For some reason this couple is not allowed to make love so the God upstairs had to separate them and they can only see each other this one day each year. As for the bunny, we were told it just stays with the woman on the moon all year protecting her? There must be more to the story.
On our trip down the mountain back to the airport we were reminded of God’s perfect timing once again. We had gotten such an early start we had a gondola all to ourselves just the two of us. When we got to the bottom they were packing the gondolas with 10+people and there was a huuuuuuge line waiting to get on! (we had just walked on). On the bus back to the airport it started raining—if we had been sweating up those steps to Buddha just a few minutes later we would have been drenched!
I’m hoping Hong Kong airport sink water is safe to drink because I guess they don’t believe in drinking fountains there and I was feeling too cheap to buy the bottled water J We’re back at the waiting game in the airport, excited for the next leg of our journey but still nervous for what’s to come!
Fun fact: Wednesday this week was only 9 hours long for us
Realization: We will be travelling from Tuesday p.m. till Friday a.m. in Bangladesh without a shower. Maybe our smell will help keep away the curious American-lookers J
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