Arriving in China was a bit overwhelming. When we learn about China in school we learn that it is the largest country in the world in terms of population with over one billion people. Our first port was Hong Kong, and we were faced with the debate of whether we were actually in China or not. There is much controversy over whether Hong Kong is really part of China or a whole other country, but we view it as the Puerto Rico of China—a territory of China, but separate in its own right.
DEAR MOM AND DAD…I KNOW YOU’RE NOT GOING TO LIKE IT, BUT HERE’S MY FIRST DAY IN HONG KONG!!! LOVE, KAYLA <3
So we arrive in Hong Kong and getting off of the ship was a challenge in itself. When you are roaming around Hong Kong you don’t need your passport unless you are traveling across land to other provinces or meeting the boat in Shanghai, which I was doing. So we needed to wait for immigration to clear our passports and only then could we get off of the ship.
The first day in Hong Kong was a free day that I had to roam around and see the city, but I decided to spend my day doing something dangerous and wild!! After waiting about 3 or so hours for our passports a group of us SAS’ers traveled to Macau, a province of Hong Kong that requires a forty five minute ferry ride, and ventured to Macau Tower. This is the location of…the HIGEST BUNGEE JUMP IN THE WORLD!!! Yes that’s right, I went bungee jumping!! My mother is probably freaking out right now while reading this, especially since I never mentioned that this is what I planned on doing.
We get to Macau Tower and take the elevator to the 61st FLOOR! Now since our passports took so long to get our appointments were all screwed up. There were about 50 or so of us and so it was chaos getting everyone harnessed and hooked up to jump off of the building. Our group was supposed to jump around 2:30pm and I didn’t end up jumping until almost 6pm. It was an all day event, but in the end it was all worth it. Ed went ahead of me and his reaction was making me a little nervous. He was a little freaked out—but it was completely understanding, since the second you look over the edge and see how high up you are, who wouldn’t be having a little freak out session? But after saying a few choice words which I will leave you to guess what they were, he did it and I was so proud of him for doing it. He thought I was going to be the one to be scared and chicken out, but it was a comfort to know that he was a little scared too. A few more people got up and jumped before me and then it was my turn. Once I realized that it was my time, my stomach was doing some flip flops and I was shaking. My harness is on and they are strapping the bungee around my ankles and I was getting scared. A guy comes over to interview me, which will be on a DVD if I want to buy it, and he is distracting me asking me how I’m feeling and where I’m from and things like that. All of a sudden I see the bungee cord being pulled up signaling that they are ready to hook me up and I penguin-hop over to the “plank”. Once I am on the plank I realize there is no turning back. I have all of the SAS’ers there cheering for me telling me that I can do this and that was a comfort. Two of the guys who were telling me what was going to happen (they count you down 5-4-3-2-BUNGEE, you fall and once you start recoiling pull the red strap that is around your feet and that will release your feet and you will be in the sitting up position recoiling which will be more comfortable and not to worry if I can’t pull it because I will just be upside down until I get lowered to the ground) and then they were the ones helping me walk to the plank and holding my harness until I was ready to jump. I hear the two minute count down and I am thinking that I am absolutely crazy but the adrenaline is pumping and I can’t help but be excited at the same time. I am at the highest bungee in the world and about to be flying through the air. They tell me to look to my right for a picture and all of a sudden they are saying are you ready…5-4-3-2…and then I jump off of the plank and I am flying. All of the fear is gone and I feel like I am the only one in the world and couldn’t be happier. I start recoiling and pull the red strap and all of a sudden I am sitting up bouncing up and down and can’t help but scream. I am so excited and happy and all of that waiting was completely worth it. That was one of the most unbelievable experiences of my life and I am so happy that I did it. How many people can say that they jumped off of the highest bungee in the world? Not many, but I am one of them and am so happy about that. I got the DVD and pictures and I know that my parents are probably freaking about this right now that their little girl jumped off of a building, but its okay. I’m happy and I survived and I will show them and anyone who wants to see the video and pictures that want to see it.
Now we only had two days in Hong Kong and one of them was spent jumping off a building, and the other one was spent hailing a cab and heading to the Hong Kong airport to catch a flight to Beijing. I am sad I didn’t get to spend a lot of time in Hong Kong, but I know that someday in the future that is one of the places I want to return to and spend the time to really see it.
I was on my way to Beijing to meet the tour guides of the China Guide who would take us around and take us to the Great Wall of China. We got to Beijing around 6pm, found our tour guides and were taken by bus to the hotel. There were about 250 SAS kids going on this trip, so everywhere we went we saw SAS’ers. Picture this; we needed to have three different flights, three different hotels, and eight different buses to accommodate us. The tour guides even said that they have been doing this for about five years, ten semesters and this is the largest group that they’ve ever had.
So we are taken to our hotel, and it is definitely not a five star hotel…it reminded me of a Motel 6. Just figuring out how to turn the lights on in the room was a task in itself. You needed to insert one of your keys in a slot on the wall, slam the slot in because it’s not fully screwed onto the wall, and then turn the knobs that are on your nightstand just to have the lights on. That was just way too complicated if you ask me. We had the night in Beijing free, so a group of us decided to go out and get some dinner. Let’s just say that was much more difficult than we thought it was going to be. We walked down this pedestrian only street which was full of people just walking around and enjoying the culture. We ventured over there and noticed some little restaurants and decided to give one of those a try. We had probably one of the funniest dinners I think I’ve ever had in my life. No one spoke English and trying to order while just looking at pictures turned into none of us knowing what we were ordering. Our food came and we realized that the majority of it was inedible. Carly ordered these veggies wrapped in tofu kind of dish and you would have thought that it was wrapped in a napkin. Gail ordered this beef thing and she couldn’t get through it either. Our friend Lindsey had ordered some noodle soup that was actually massive and the broth was so garlicky and the flavor was just way too much to handle. Amy ordered beef that looked like it was in some form of teriyaki sauce and it was definitely not. Our new friend Naya and I both ordered chicken that was supposed to be in tomato sauce or something, and out of all of the dishes on our table, it was the only thing that was somewhat edible it was the only thing that resembled American style Chinese food. I wasn’t really a fan of it, but everyone else seemed to like it, until Gail tasted a piece and it crunched in the wrong way and when she spit it out it looked like she had bit into an eyeball. Just the amount of quotes that we said from this dinner was the funniest dinner I have ever sat through.
After dinner, we noticed a long line on the street of street vendors with stands of food. we walked down to see what kinds of food they had and I was probably traumatized by the kinds of foods I was seeing—snake, scorpions, shrimp with eyeballs all on sticks and even though these don’t sound too scary when the vendors can tell you are freaked out and they throw snake on a stick at you it is scary!! But that wasn’t the worst part—we reached the end of the line and someone offered me dog on a stick...I almost cried thinking about eating a dog. Food in China is nothing like what I had imagined, but I am glad I at least tried it.
After a long day of flying and seeing all of the different kinds of wild foods, we headed back to our hotel to get some sleep. We had to be checked out and at the bus by 8am. When we woke up we got some breakfast at the hotel and made our way to the buses. We drove to another hotel to meet up with the rest of the groups and then form groups of 30. You would think this would be easy, but when you have over 200 kids trying to create groups with their friends and such, it turns into chaos. It took much longer than it needed to create these groups, but once we got our group we got to a bus and were on our way. I was so happy with the group I was in. I was with Amy and some of our friends Maggie and Marissa. We were with their friends and it turned into a great trip because we all became such good friends.
Our first stop was the Forbidden City and then Tiananmen Square—some of the oldest sites in China. After spending a couple of hours there and listening to the incredible history from our awesome tour guide Serena, we were taken to the Silk Market. This place was awesome!!! This market was six floors and there was so much stuff to look at—jewelry, designer shoes, purses, wallets, jackets, clothes, etc and we get to sharpen our bargaining skills!. We were only given about an hour and a half, which was definitely not enough time there. I was able to get so much stuff and was so excited J
We were taken to a restaurant for dinner, which was authentic Chinese cuisine. It was good for the most part and as part of dinner we were all told that we should change into warmer clothes because after dinner we were going to start walking to the Great Wall. It was already cold, but it was only going to get colder. We got dressed (5 long sleeve shirts, 3 pairs of pants, 6 pairs of socks, 2 winter hats, gloves, sneakers, winter jacket) and I was still cold. We started the walk to the Great Wall and it was intense. It was like the mother of all Stairmasters, but we got to the top and walked along the Great Wall to our tower. Each group would be stationed at one of the towers and along the wall. We set up our sleeping bags and just wondered around. We were provided snacks, water (which was pretty much frozen) and beers. I’ll just let you picture what went on when a bunch of college kids were provided alcohol. It got a little crazy, and after a while there were students who were pretty much trashing the Great Wall and I was getting so annoyed. After a while I decided to just go back to my sleeping bag and try to get some sleep. Sleep never came because trying to sleep while trying to breathe in negative degree weather was next to impossible. I spent the night just waiting for sunrise.
Light eventually came and we woke up to see the sunrise rising over the towers of the Great Wall and it was absolutely beautiful. I had to take a minute to just take it all in. After wrapping up our sleeping bags and bringing them back down to the bottom of the wall, we walked back up and began our morning hike along the Great Wall. It was absolutely amazing. I couldn’t believe that I was actually walking on the Great Wall of China. It is so immense and beautiful and something it was just so surreal that I was actually there. We were walking along taking tons of photographs, and picked up some of the trash that other SAS’ers left behind in their wild night on the wall. At that moment, I was ashamed of my peers and what had happened. We were on the Great Wall of China, and instead of enjoying it in all of its glory, there was drinking and partying going on. There is a time and place, and this wasn’t it. We saw workers coming up with trash bags loading them up after cleaning up the garbage. I felt so bad.
We finished our trek along the Great Wall of China, and made our way back to the buses. When we gathered up our entire group, we were taken to the site of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Stadium. It was so cool to see the sites and know that that was the place where Michael Phelps broke all of those records. We were taken to some other sites around Beijing before being taken to the train station.
We got on the train and found our sleeper car. Each group had a car and there were four people to a room. Each room had two sets of bunk beds. I was in a room with Amy, and our friends Naya and Andre. It was a lot of fun. We relaxed and played card games for a while before falling asleep. Sleep wasn’t the easiest with a bunch of SAS’ers celebrating their 21st birthdays. There were at least two of them and you can only imagine how that went—about 150 SAS’ers on an overnight train to Shanghai celebrating 21st birthdays—chaos!!
We arrived in Shanghai around 7:15am, got off of the train and were greeted by China Guide’s tour guides which would take us to the ship. The ship was docking at 8am, so we had some time before we arrived and before the ship was cleared. We convinced our guide and bus driver to go to McDonald’s for breakfast.
We made our way back to the ship, and had to wait in a LONGGG line before getting back on the ship. Each person needed to have their passport looked at before getting on the ship and all of our bags searched, as always, but when each person is returning from three days traveling, we all had multiple bags, so waiting for our bags to be searched took a long time. We eventually made it back on the ship, but were then informed that since we did not travel with the ship between Hong Kong and Shanghai we needed to turn in our passports for immigration to clear them. We were told it would take about an hour. About four hours later, we were able to get off of the ship again. I went out with a small group of people who were in our group on the Great Wall. It was a lot of fun! We went shopping at this market and were able to get a bunch of stuff—like I needed to do more shopping. Oh well, things were just so cheap and I was having so much fun bargaining that I couldn’t resist.
The next morning was our last day in Shanghai. I had an FDP to go to for my sociology class. I was able to go to the Urban Planning Museum and then meet with a company who is working to find alternate energy sources. They are a company which focuses on environmental issues around the world. It was very interesting to listen to what they had to say.
We got back earlier than expected, and as I was getting my passport checked, Ed and Ashleigh were walking down the gangway. We went out for the day and found another market. As if I hadn’t done enough shopping in Asia, we did some more. We made it back to the ship around 5:30pm, with thirty minutes to spare without getting dock time (we have on-ship time in which we all have to be back on the ship, with our passports turned in and if we are even a second late we get dock time which is penalty in the next port. For every 15 minutes you are late, you are penalized with three hours that you have to wait to get off of the ship in the next port).
Looking back on my time in China, I absolutely loved every minute of it. I got to jump off of a building and fly through the air feeling as though I was on top of the world, and I got to sleep on the Great Wall of China, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. It was the experience of a lifetime and no matter how cold I was and miserable at the time, it was probably one of the best experiences of my life. I am so grateful for the opportunities that I have had on this voyage and feel like one of the luckiest people in the world. This has been the journey of a lifetime and it has affected me in ways that I cannot even describe.
Up Next: Japan!!
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