China

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Hong Kong
We got into Hong Kong at about 8 am, and the first thing that I noticed was how crazy the skyline was. There were tons of really cool architectural skyscrapers that were all in the foreground of a mountain. It was by far the coolest view that we have had from the ship while in port. Anyway, we got off the ship at about 11 am and I went out with a few of my friends to go to Stanley Beach. We took a bus that took us over the mountain (so we got to overlook the city from its other side), and into the market that was right by the beach. Once we got there we went and grabbed some lunch at a place along the pier, and then went and walked along the beach. Most of the beach was covered with huge rocks that you had to climb over, so I scrambled around on these for a while and enjoyed the views looking back on the market and watched some sailboats scooting across the water for a while. After checking out the scenery and going in the water a little we headed back to Hong Kong and explored some of the city for a while, but most of it seemed to be malls, so besides looking at the architecture of the buildings, there wasn’t much to see. We eventually headed back to the ship for dinner, and we got to enjoy looking at the awesome lit up skyline while eating dinner outside on the 6th deck. Every night on Hong Kong Island (we were actually docked on Kowloon Island, which was only a 10 minute ferry ride away) they have a laser/light show where they use all of the crazy skyscrapers across the harbor from our ship for the show. We went out to a pier near the ship and watched all of the buildings being lit up along with some Chinese sounding music. It was a pretty cool show, but it was really crowded on the pier, which surprised me because the show goes on every night. After the show we went out on the town to the “bar/club street” which was called Lan Kwai Fong. This was a really fun area because the street was really busy with people going around to all the different clubs, and it was just a crazy time. After hanging out there for a while we went back to the ship and went to bed. After breakfast on the ship the next morning I headed out with a couple buddies to go to the Space Museum. Unfortunately the museum wasn’t open until one o’clock, so we took the ferry over to Hong Kong Island and explored for a while. We rode around and checked out the city from the second level of an open-air bus, and then grabbed some Dim Sum for lunch. After that we headed back to Kowloon to go to the Museum. It was a pretty interesting museum and they had some cool things to see as well as to do (such as virtual hang gliding, a demo of what its like to use one of the “astronaut jet packs” that are used to get around in space, and also a demo of what its like to walk on the moon ). After exploring the exhibits we watched a movie that they were showing about the Swiss Alps. It was shown in an Omniplex theatre (which is the type that is a massive dome that goes all the way around and over your head), and was a really cool movie about these people climbing the tallest part of the Alps. After that we had to go back to the ship and pack up all our things so that we could leave for Beijing and then eventually meet the ship in Shanghai. Before we left Hong Kong though, we took a cable car to the top of Victoria’s Peak, which is the tallest part of the mountain that I took a bus around on the first day. At the Peak there is a giant mall and a bunch of restaurants to go along with the awesome view of the city. We got up there and checked out the view for a while and then ate dinner at one of the restaurants before getting a cab to the subway station and starting on or way to Beijing.

Beijing
Our trip to Beijing had a very interesting start because we were trying to travel in kind of a large group, and so before we had even made it to the subway we had lost two members of our group. We waited around in the metro station for a little bit, but they knew where to go so we just decided to go catch our subway. But then two members of our group went out of a turnstile that they weren’t supposed to, so they couldn’t get back in without buying another ticket. One of them decided to simply jump a gate (which ended up working out fine), but the other one went to buy another ticket and was going to meet us near the subway…long story short he didn’t show, and another member of our group went to look for him and was gone for about a half an hour before coming back and saying he couldn’t find him. We got on the subway and made our way to Shenzhen (which is in mainland China) because domestic flights were much cheaper to Beijing. Once we got to Shenzhen we got bothered by taxi drivers and one homeless lady for about a half an hour until all of the members of our group finally showed up, at which point we got a taxi to our hotel. After a pretty bad night of sleep on what seemed like a concrete mattress in a 90° room, we woke up early the next morning and got to the airport on time, but had a scary situation because one of our friends had their passport and boarding pass stolen while going through security. Luckily the airport officials were able to look at the security tapes and see exactly who had taken it, and they tracked him down and retrieved her passport.
Once we landed in Beijing we waited around in the airport for everybody to show up, and then we all got on a bus to head to Tiananmen Square where our hotels/hostels were all nearby. We all went our separate ways to find lodging at this point, and I went with Michael and our friend Colin to find a cheap hostel to stay at. We walked around for quite a while and asked a few people if they knew where a hostel was, but most of the people we asked didn’t know what a hostel was…that was kind of frustrating, but we soon found a helpful source that pointed us to the nearby Jade Youth Hostel. It was actually a really nice place, and was only 60 Yuen a night (not even $10 US). After getting a room for the night we headed out to find some food. We ended up running into this couple on a street corner from Beijing that spoke English and said that they were also going to eat. They seemed like they were just trying to be helpful at first, but we were warned that people like this will take you to Tea Houses and you will be charged outrageous prices after the meal. So once they turned down our first couple suggestions of places that we saw to eat, and then eventually led us into a Tea House that didn’t even seem to sell food, we got suspicious and told them that we were going to find our own place to eat. They followed us for a while after that, but eventually realized that we weren’t going to eat anywhere they did, so they left us alone. We headed back to Tiananmen Square because we figured that there would be little food stands there, but there weren’t any. We ended up meeting another local though (Jason was his “English name”), and he seemed to be a lot more trustworthy (even though he was wearing a Yankees hat) than the couple that we had met earlier. Jason was a pearl salesman from Shanghai, and was in Beijing on a business trip. He took us to a part of the city called Old Beijing, which was right by Tiananmen Square. This was a really cool section of town because it had a lot of old architecture and a lot of local shops and restaurants. After wandering around Old Beijing for a while we found a little restaurant to have lunch at. It was an interesting place because on the menu they had “spiced dog meat”, duck heads, and fish head soup…we tried to stay away from those kind of dishes, but the beef soup that Michael ordered seemed kind of suspicious, and we decided that there is a good chance we ate dog…yummy! After our late lunch we got on the subway and headed to go see the Olympic buildings. By the time we got to the Olympic buildings it was dark out, so the “Cube” and the “Birds Nest” were all lit up, and looked really cool. It was awesome seeing these impressive buildings in person after having watched the Olympics take place in them all summer. After seeing that we took the subway to a station near our hostel, but we took a wrong turn once we got off the subway and ended up walking around in the cold (it was like 40° F) for quite a while, and we didn’t make it back to our hostel until about 9 pm. We went out for a late dinner at a Beijing style “Hot Pot” restaurant. This was a really cool experience because what happens at a hot pot restaurant is they bring you our a big pot with boiling sauce in it, and then they just bring you out a bunch of ingredients and you cook them yourself. We ordered lamb, bean sprouts, mushrooms, and noodles, and then cooked them all up. I really liked the food, but the whole experience of cooking it yourself was even better than the food. After dinner we went back to the hostel and ended up meeting a couple of Canadian guys that had been in Beijing for the last week or so, and they told us a fun area of town to go visit, so we went out for a couple hours and checked out this street that had like 15 bars on it. We met some guys from Germany that were studying in Beijing, and after talking with them for a while and checking out a few of the bars, we headed back to the hostel.
We got up the next morning and got ready to go climb the Great Wall of China! We grabbed some breakfast at a little bakery, and then got on a bus for the two-hour ride to the wall. After the long ride, we got off the bus and were immediately surrounded by thousands of Asian tourists that were also visiting the Great Wall. We had decided to go to the “touristy” section of the wall because all of the other sections of the wall to visit were way further away, and we didn’t want to spend our entire day on a bus. Anyway it was pretty crowded for most of our walk along the wall, but it was really awesome being up on the massive wall in the middle of the mountains. I actually didn’t mind the other tourists there at all because it was really fun to watch them climbing up and down the steep sections of the wall, and it was funny how they kept taking pictures of us, or asking if they could take a picture with us. We were freaks to them! I was surprised at how steep some of the sections of the wall were, and a lot of times instead of walking down the steps (if there actually were steps) we would slide down the hand rails instead, which was fun but scary because you could go really fast if you didn’t hold yourself back. Anyway, we walked for about 3 or 4 hours before we reached a section of the wall that was blocked off. At this point we were able to go down some steps into another little shopping area that was up the hill from where we had originally started off. They had some bears in a giant pen for some reason, and a bunch of people were throwing them food, so all the bears were acting really crazy so they could get attention and therefore get more food. It was kind of sad for the bears. After grabbing some lunch at one of the restaurants in the area, we got back on a bus and headed back to Beijing. We wandered around the “Wangfujing Market” after we accidentally stumbled across it, which was pretty cool because it was a closed off street that had a bunch of cool buildings with crazy lights going on, and there were people all over the place coming in and out of the many stores and shops. We also found the “food street” on our way back to our hostel. This had like 50 booths that were all selling crazy local foods. Some of the food looked really good, but some of it was just really weird (like crickets, starfish, squid on a stick, and chicken feet). We went back to the hostel to relax for a while and were going to go back to the “food street” for dinner, but by the time we got back to there it was closed, so we had a little bit of sushi, and then just called it a night because we were pretty tired from walking around all day.
The next day we woke up real early and made our way to go check out the Forbidden City. It was a really impressive complex, and had a bunch of really cool buildings with very intricate artwork and architecture. There were tons of Asian tourists there too, and they had the same reaction to us that we got at the Great Wall. One Chinese lady actually looked at me and started laughing, and then she turned and said something to her group of friends, and they all started pointing at my legs and laughing too! Apparently they thought I was insane for wearing shorts in winter, but it wasn’t cold enough to have to wear pants, so I didn’t. After seeing the Forbidden City we went to the Summer Palace, which had a big lake and a bunch of buildings similar to those in the Forbidden City. We walked around there for an hour or two, just taking in the scenery, and then we made our way to the subway to head to the airport. We had been rushing to get there because we had stopped to get some lunch after the Summer Palace, but our flight was delayed an hour anyway, so we had to sit around in the airport for quite a while before heading to Shanghai.

Shanghai
It took us a while to get a cab that knew where we needed to go (mostly because no one spoke any English), but we finally got one, and got back to the ship about 40 minutes later. After taking a quick shower a big group of us headed out to this really fancy club that was on the 7th floor of a hotel. Everything was really expensive there, but there was an outdoor terrace with a pretty cool view, so a bunch of us just hung out there for a while before heading back to the ship for the night. The next day we had planned to get up really early to go explore Shanghai, but our alarm didn’t go off, and our port hole was closed, so it was still pitch black in our room when I finally woke up at about 8:30. The porthole was closed because apparently there had been 18-foot waves crashing into the boat while it was on its way to Shanghai from Hong Kong! I guess it was a pretty rough ride for those few people that were on the ship…Anyway Michael and I went out by ourselves at like 9, and just had a cab driver take us to a couple different markets where we got some food and wandered around, fending off the many vendors that bothered us non-stop. We eventually just started acting like we were insane when they came around us, and that would usually scare them away from us. It was actually kind of fun messing with them. Anyway we wandered through a good section of the city, and then had to get back to the ship for our short SAS trip to the Children’s Palace. This was a place where Chinese kids go for lessons in many different art forms such as painting, music, drawing, writing, etc. Unfortunately there were not a lot of students there on this day because apparently they were having tests in school, but we saw a little girl learning piano, a drawing class, an art class, and a little boy singing opera. It was kind of cool to see, I just thought that we would have been able to interact with the kids, but we were just observers. We also were given a performance by an old man playing what looked like a home made violin, but sounded awful! I would describe the sound as a mixture of bad violin playing, bagpipes, nails on a chalkboard, and a cat being strangled…ha ha…it wasn’t really that bad, but it wasn’t good. Anyway, after that we headed back to the ship and started on our journey to Japan!Hong Kong
We got into Hong Kong at about 8 am, and the first thing that I noticed was how crazy the skyline was. There were tons of really cool architectural skyscrapers that were all in the foreground of a mountain. It was by far the coolest view that we have had from the ship while in port. Anyway, we got off the ship at about 11 am and I went out with a few of my friends to go to Stanley Beach. We took a bus that took us over the mountain (so we got to overlook the city from its other side), and into the market that was right by the beach. Once we got there we went and grabbed some lunch at a place along the pier, and then went and walked along the beach. Most of the beach was covered with huge rocks that you had to climb over, so I scrambled around on these for a while and enjoyed the views looking back on the market and watched some sailboats scooting across the water for a while. After checking out the scenery and going in the water a little we headed back to Hong Kong and explored some of the city for a while, but most of it seemed to be malls, so besides looking at the architecture of the buildings, there wasn’t much to see. We eventually headed back to the ship for dinner, and we got to enjoy looking at the awesome lit up skyline while eating dinner outside on the 6th deck. Every night on Hong Kong Island (we were actually docked on Kowloon Island, which was only a 10 minute ferry ride away) they have a laser/light show where they use all of the crazy skyscrapers across the harbor from our ship for the show. We went out to a pier near the ship and watched all of the buildings being lit up along with some Chinese sounding music. It was a pretty cool show, but it was really crowded on the pier, which surprised me because the show goes on every night. After the show we went out on the town to the “bar/club street” which was called Lan Kwai Fong. This was a really fun area because the street was really busy with people going around to all the different clubs, and it was just a crazy time. After hanging out there for a while we went back to the ship and went to bed. After breakfast on the ship the next morning I headed out with a couple buddies to go to the Space Museum. Unfortunately the museum wasn’t open until one o’clock, so we took the ferry over to Hong Kong Island and explored for a while. We rode around and checked out the city from the second level of an open-air bus, and then grabbed some Dim Sum for lunch. After that we headed back to Kowloon to go to the Museum. It was a pretty interesting museum and they had some cool things to see as well as to do (such as virtual hang gliding, a demo of what its like to use one of the “astronaut jet packs” that are used to get around in space, and also a demo of what its like to walk on the moon ). After exploring the exhibits we watched a movie that they were showing about the Swiss Alps. It was shown in an Omniplex theatre (which is the type that is a massive dome that goes all the way around and over your head), and was a really cool movie about these people climbing the tallest part of the Alps. After that we had to go back to the ship and pack up all our things so that we could leave for Beijing and then eventually meet the ship in Shanghai. Before we left Hong Kong though, we took a cable car to the top of Victoria’s Peak, which is the tallest part of the mountain that I took a bus around on the first day. At the Peak there is a giant mall and a bunch of restaurants to go along with the awesome view of the city. We got up there and checked out the view for a while and then ate dinner at one of the restaurants before getting a cab to the subway station and starting on or way to Beijing.

Beijing
Our trip to Beijing had a very interesting start because we were trying to travel in kind of a large group, and so before we had even made it to the subway we had lost two members of our group. We waited around in the metro station for a little bit, but they knew where to go so we just decided to go catch our subway. But then two members of our group went out of a turnstile that they weren’t supposed to, so they couldn’t get back in without buying another ticket. One of them decided to simply jump a gate (which ended up working out fine), but the other one went to buy another ticket and was going to meet us near the subway…long story short he didn’t show, and another member of our group went to look for him and was gone for about a half an hour before coming back and saying he couldn’t find him. We got on the subway and made our way to Shenzhen (which is in mainland China) because domestic flights were much cheaper to Beijing. Once we got to Shenzhen we got bothered by taxi drivers and one homeless lady for about a half an hour until all of the members of our group finally showed up, at which point we got a taxi to our hotel. After a pretty bad night of sleep on what seemed like a concrete mattress in a 90° room, we woke up early the next morning and got to the airport on time, but had a scary situation because one of our friends had their passport and boarding pass stolen while going through security. Luckily the airport officials were able to look at the security tapes and see exactly who had taken it, and they tracked him down and retrieved her passport.
Once we landed in Beijing we waited around in the airport for everybody to show up, and then we all got on a bus to head to Tiananmen Square where our hotels/hostels were all nearby. We all went our separate ways to find lodging at this point, and I went with Michael and our friend Colin to find a cheap hostel to stay at. We walked around for quite a while and asked a few people if they knew where a hostel was, but most of the people we asked didn’t know what a hostel was…that was kind of frustrating, but we soon found a helpful source that pointed us to the nearby Jade Youth Hostel. It was actually a really nice place, and was only 60 Yuen a night (not even $10 US). After getting a room for the night we headed out to find some food. We ended up running into this couple on a street corner from Beijing that spoke English and said that they were also going to eat. They seemed like they were just trying to be helpful at first, but we were warned that people like this will take you to Tea Houses and you will be charged outrageous prices after the meal. So once they turned down our first couple suggestions of places that we saw to eat, and then eventually led us into a Tea House that didn’t even seem to sell food, we got suspicious and told them that we were going to find our own place to eat. They followed us for a while after that, but eventually realized that we weren’t going to eat anywhere they did, so they left us alone. We headed back to Tiananmen Square because we figured that there would be little food stands there, but there weren’t any. We ended up meeting another local though (Jason was his “English name”), and he seemed to be a lot more trustworthy (even though he was wearing a Yankees hat) than the couple that we had met earlier. Jason was a pearl salesman from Shanghai, and was in Beijing on a business trip. He took us to a part of the city called Old Beijing, which was right by Tiananmen Square. This was a really cool section of town because it had a lot of old architecture and a lot of local shops and restaurants. After wandering around Old Beijing for a while we found a little restaurant to have lunch at. It was an interesting place because on the menu they had “spiced dog meat”, duck heads, and fish head soup…we tried to stay away from those kind of dishes, but the beef soup that Michael ordered seemed kind of suspicious, and we decided that there is a good chance we ate dog…yummy! After our late lunch we got on the subway and headed to go see the Olympic buildings. By the time we got to the Olympic buildings it was dark out, so the “Cube” and the “Birds Nest” were all lit up, and looked really cool. It was awesome seeing these impressive buildings in person after having watched the Olympics take place in them all summer. After seeing that we took the subway to a station near our hostel, but we took a wrong turn once we got off the subway and ended up walking around in the cold (it was like 40° F) for quite a while, and we didn’t make it back to our hostel until about 9 pm. We went out for a late dinner at a Beijing style “Hot Pot” restaurant. This was a really cool experience because what happens at a hot pot restaurant is they bring you our a big pot with boiling sauce in it, and then they just bring you out a bunch of ingredients and you cook them yourself. We ordered lamb, bean sprouts, mushrooms, and noodles, and then cooked them all up. I really liked the food, but the whole experience of cooking it yourself was even better than the food. After dinner we went back to the hostel and ended up meeting a couple of Canadian guys that had been in Beijing for the last week or so, and they told us a fun area of town to go visit, so we went out for a couple hours and checked out this street that had like 15 bars on it. We met some guys from Germany that were studying in Beijing, and after talking with them for a while and checking out a few of the bars, we headed back to the hostel.
We got up the next morning and got ready to go climb the Great Wall of China! We grabbed some breakfast at a little bakery, and then got on a bus for the two-hour ride to the wall. After the long ride, we got off the bus and were immediately surrounded by thousands of Asian tourists that were also visiting the Great Wall. We had decided to go to the “touristy” section of the wall because all of the other sections of the wall to visit were way further away, and we didn’t want to spend our entire day on a bus. Anyway it was pretty crowded for most of our walk along the wall, but it was really awesome being up on the massive wall in the middle of the mountains. I actually didn’t mind the other tourists there at all because it was really fun to watch them climbing up and down the steep sections of the wall, and it was funny how they kept taking pictures of us, or asking if they could take a picture with us. We were freaks to them! I was surprised at how steep some of the sections of the wall were, and a lot of times instead of walking down the steps (if there actually were steps) we would slide down the hand rails instead, which was fun but scary because you could go really fast if you didn’t hold yourself back. Anyway, we walked for about 3 or 4 hours before we reached a section of the wall that was blocked off. At this point we were able to go down some steps into another little shopping area that was up the hill from where we had originally started off. They had some bears in a giant pen for some reason, and a bunch of people were throwing them food, so all the bears were acting really crazy so they could get attention and therefore get more food. It was kind of sad for the bears. After grabbing some lunch at one of the restaurants in the area, we got back on a bus and headed back to Beijing. We wandered around the “Wangfujing Market” after we accidentally stumbled across it, which was pretty cool because it was a closed off street that had a bunch of cool buildings with crazy lights going on, and there were people all over the place coming in and out of the many stores and shops. We also found the “food street” on our way back to our hostel. This had like 50 booths that were all selling crazy local foods. Some of the food looked really good, but some of it was just really weird (like crickets, starfish, squid on a stick, and chicken feet). We went back to the hostel to relax for a while and were going to go back to the “food street” for dinner, but by the time we got back to there it was closed, so we had a little bit of sushi, and then just called it a night because we were pretty tired from walking around all day.
The next day we woke up real early and made our way to go check out the Forbidden City. It was a really impressive complex, and had a bunch of really cool buildings with very intricate artwork and architecture. There were tons of Asian tourists there too, and they had the same reaction to us that we got at the Great Wall. One Chinese lady actually looked at me and started laughing, and then she turned and said something to her group of friends, and they all started pointing at my legs and laughing too! Apparently they thought I was insane for wearing shorts in winter, but it wasn’t cold enough to have to wear pants, so I didn’t. After seeing the Forbidden City we went to the Summer Palace, which had a big lake and a bunch of buildings similar to those in the Forbidden City. We walked around there for an hour or two, just taking in the scenery, and then we made our way to the subway to head to the airport. We had been rushing to get there because we had stopped to get some lunch after the Summer Palace, but our flight was delayed an hour anyway, so we had to sit around in the airport for quite a while before heading to Shanghai.

Shanghai
It took us a while to get a cab that knew where we needed to go (mostly because no one spoke any English), but we finally got one, and got back to the ship about 40 minutes later. After taking a quick shower a big group of us headed out to this really fancy club that was on the 7th floor of a hotel. Everything was really expensive there, but there was an outdoor terrace with a pretty cool view, so a bunch of us just hung out there for a while before heading back to the ship for the night. The next day we had planned to get up really early to go explore Shanghai, but our alarm didn’t go off, and our port hole was closed, so it was still pitch black in our room when I finally woke up at about 8:30. The porthole was closed because apparently there had been 18-foot waves crashing into the boat while it was on its way to Shanghai from Hong Kong! I guess it was a pretty rough ride for those few people that were on the ship…Anyway Michael and I went out by ourselves at like 9, and just had a cab driver take us to a couple different markets where we got some food and wandered around, fending off the many vendors that bothered us non-stop. We eventually just started acting like we were insane when they came around us, and that would usually scare them away from us. It was actually kind of fun messing with them. Anyway we wandered through a good section of the city, and then had to get back to the ship for our short SAS trip to the Children’s Palace. This was a place where Chinese kids go for lessons in many different art forms such as painting, music, drawing, writing, etc. Unfortunately there were not a lot of students there on this day because apparently they were having tests in school, but we saw a little girl learning piano, a drawing class, an art class, and a little boy singing opera. It was kind of cool to see, I just thought that we would have been able to interact with the kids, but we were just observers. We also were given a performance by an old man playing what looked like a home made violin, but sounded awful! I would describe the sound as a mixture of bad violin playing, bagpipes, nails on a chalkboard, and a cat being strangled…ha ha…it wasn’t really that bad, but it wasn’t good. Anyway, after that we headed back to the ship and started on our journey to Japan!

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