Landing in the Middle Kingdom

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We dashed out of our hotel to make our early morning flight, snagging whatever food we could from the hotel's breakfast counter. We boarded with relative ease, and I found out I was one of the lucky winners of a middle seat in the central isle. Almost immediately after liftoff, they started a movie, all the windows went down, and they served us a meal. This would be the first of several hobbit-sized meals, served at hobbit-like regularity; breakfast, second breakfast, elevensies, ect. They seemed to coincide with the beginning of each new movie, and reflected what the particular movie would be about (I knew "Kungfu Panda" would be coming up next when they served us a bowl of ramen noodles).

I found that my first international flight essentially reverted me back to my infant days. Since I couldn't move much, all I did all day was eat and sleep, and when that got boring, I pooped.

We landed into Hong Kong and grouped up with the other teachers. There were about 100 of us in total, each carrying an average of 2 bags, weighing 50 lbs each. Our 25,000 lbs of American flesh and luggage were then squeezed onto two buses capable of carrying about half of that, and after packing and repacking the bus twice, we hired a third bus just for luggage. Onward to Zhuhai!

Hong Kong was a blur- the small amount of the city that I saw was mostly housing- soaring buildings that rose 30 to 40 stories, laundry hanging out on nearly every window. They were of domino like shape and arrangement. We traveled along a body of water, and there were peculiar floating wooden docks, spread out across the waters like a spilled pack of playing cards. I gathered that they were dropped off onto them, because I didn't see any boats docked next to them. When it grew dark I dozed off, and when I came to we were in Zhuhai- the city I would spend the next two weeks training in TEFL and learning a spattering of Chinese.

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