I got to Hong Kong despite Air Canada

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The journey to Hong Kong turned out to be a long one. In the days leading up to the trip, Sheena and I had been worried about the layover in Vancouver due to all of the snow storms that had been occurring there for the last week or so.

My last entry was sitting in the Calgary airport while we were waiting for our plane, which was delayed about an hour due to the weather in Vancouver. When it arrived, we still sat there for a very long time waiting, and it turned out that Air Canada was fixing a "mechanical problem."

By the time our plane arrived in Vancouver, it was about an hour past when the connecting flight was supposed to leave, but thanks to a fresh storm it was still sitting there in the airport. In fact, we were able to watch the plane sitting at its gate as our own plane taxied down the tarmac. We sprinted across the airport to our other departure gate just to be told that they'd given our tickets away already. Now we were stuck in the mess in the Vancouver airport.

We had to get onto standby with Cathay Pacific to wait for the next chance to get out of there. Discouragingly we met lots of other people also waiting on standby for the same flight who had been trapped in Vancouver for 2 or even 3 days, so we weren't very optimistic. There were two more flights leaving for HK that evening, one at 12:30am and one at 2am and the only way to get on them was if there were more people like us who were delayed and missed their connecting flights. We weren't able to get on the 12:30, but we did get on the 2:30 and when it left (at 4:30) we finally were on our way... without baggage.

Oh well, we certainly could have been stuck in Vancouver for longer, and we had to laugh at the fact that we didn't get stuck there because of the weather at all - it was just Air Canada incompetence with whatever mechanical problem they had. Nicely done Air Canada.

Anyways... Hong Kong is certainly an interesting city. It's a lot more green than I thought, and the mountains (well... big hills) around are strikingly close. There are apartment buildings are everywhere and usually there's at least 5 identical buildings in a row, which gives this city a different look than anywhere I've ever been before. It's really easy to navigate and get around here because everyone pretty much speaks English, and virtually every sign has English on it too. The weather here is around 20 degrees and overcast, so it's kind of like room temperature outside - certainly not too bad. One of Sheena's uncles apologized for the cold weather when we landed. I had to laugh at that.

Today I went with Sheena's family to Ocean Park, which is pretty much Sea World. Really crowded, and full of tourists which were mostly from the Chinese mainland. Most of them had never seen someone as tall as me, so to my amusement I got a lot of curious glances from people.

Oh, and I've discovered Chinese milk tea which is super strong tea with evaporated milk and is fantastic. I told Sheena that I was going to have one every day that I'm here.

Still waiting on baggage though... rockin' the sweatpants until I get it. I tried buying new pants here, but it's even more futile than back home.

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