Goodbye, Asia

Well. I want to stop any alarmists out there from thinking this is the last post. We aren’t going home home yet. We are, however, about to start a long journey back to the US.

We have two legs of our trip left, and both are in our home country. First stop, Los Angeles, California. My aunt and uncle live there and we are very excited to get to see them today! On that note, we have a weird day ahead of us. It will be 40 hours long in total. We arrive in Los Angeles at 1:30pm or so local time, and leave Hong Kong at 12:35pm local time. From leaving the apartment this morning to arriving at my aunt’s home in LA, we estimate about 22 hours of total travel time for the day.

After LA, we are going to the Grand Canyon with our best friend, the third musketeer, Elizabeth. She is joining us there, taking some time off work to spend a long weekend with her sisters-errant.

Then we will be home home.

In the meantime, please do keep reading because there will be several updates with some fun, end-of-the-trip summary posts that Loren and I have been working on and brainstorming for a while.

In other news, our last few days abroad have been very eventful! We went to the horse races in Hong Kong and instead of betting money (as we know zilch about horse racing), we placed private bets against each other for things like the last chocolate, or the right to pick which movie to watch first when we get home (we have a list).

There were some really great races with come-from-behind and neck-in-neck wins–quite literally! The horses for 1, 2, and 3 in the third race were so close it was impossible to tell who won without the overhead view, and even then it was inches apart. Loren correctly bet on both 1st and 2nd place in that race! The horses all had fun names, as we expected. Loren’s 1-2 pair was Compact Yarn and How Wonderful. My against-the-odds, come-from-behind winner in race 2 was Legendary Dragon, and My Home Town won me first choice of chocolates in the final race.

not a great shot but my only one with horses

Yesterday we went to Macau, which like Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Zone, meaning it is only kind of part of China. It has its own currency and you have to go through immigration and get another stamp in the ol’ passport (aw, darn!). While there we visited the casinos, a temple, and the greyhound races (no photos allowed at the last one). All very cool and lots of fun. Only bad part was the ferry ride back to Hong Kong. The water was very choppy and Loren gets motion sick. In her words, “I got insanely sick and I wanted to punch everyone and I hated everything and it was a miracle I didn’t throw up everywhere and it sucked.”

But it all worked out okay in the end. We made it without any assault attempts or puking, so three cheers for Loren.

at the temple, with big incense spirals behind me

New Year decorations still up everywhere in Macau

I also tried chicken congee, a local dish of very soupy rice with bone-in chicken chunks. It was not my favorite, but I’m glad I tried it.

All told, I cannot wait to come back to Asia! We have only just begun to explore Asia, and there are so many places here to visit yet. Maybe when I’m done with grad school….

Oh yeah! Forgot to mention. I’ve been awarded a full tuition waver and teaching assistantship at Syracuse University for this upcoming school year. Hurray, affordable graduate school!