Hello Victoria Harbor, Hong Kong...

As I write this I am looking out at the view of Victoria Harbor from the 15th floor of our hotel. It's foggy this evening but that isn't dampening our spirits one bit as we are enjoying a bottle of Penfold's Shiraz/Cabernet, dancing around our hotel room to the Black Eyed Peas blasting from the ipod portable boom box provided by the hotel, and Nancy Pelosi is gloating about something pseudo-democratic on CNN. Yep, definitely not in DanYang anymore...we are in hot, sexy, neon-rich Hong Kong.

Hong Kong! Special Administrative Region. Juilong...

As with practically all communications from our host schools here in China, I got the word that I didn’t need to teach for the whole week ahead, late last Thursday evening. I told Jennifer the good news but it seems she had not been told any such thing by her school. Hmmm. So with the opportunity of nine days off to explore the country dangling like a dumpling in front of us, Jennifer called her host, Cynthia, personally, and after some wrangling and hemming and harrumphing Cynthia confirmed that indeed, we both have the next week off due to student exams.

Okay, it was late Thursday night, and we did have to confirm the information otherwise we would not have been told, but, we looked at each other and just grinned like two fat cats who were sharing a canary – all of the sudden we had nine days off to explore China! And although frustrated, yes, we know they are not irritating us on purpose; our hosts simply have no concept of planning and preparing so to let us know any more than absolutely necessary and not until the very last minute possible is simply not on their list of priorities. It’s just the way things are here and we deal with it be being very flexible and thinking fast on our feet. Yes!

So within a few hours Jennifer had put together a nine-day trip starting with a quick 40-minute train ride from our lovely city, DanYang, to Shanghai for an evening in our favorite city so far, and then our adventure really began – at Shanghai we hop on a fast train (with sleeper) for a 20-hour ride from Shanghai through some of the most sceneic and beautiful provinces in China; Zhejiang, then Jiangxi, and Juangdong, until we eventually disembark at Kowloon, one of the four distinct sections of Jiulong (Hong Kong).

Although it would be deliciously convenient, we are not able to purchase train tickets all the way to Hong Kong from our little city, so we agree to pack for the best and hope for more good luck and plan on buying our tickets once we are in Shanghai. For my part, I volunteer to navigate the treacherous Shanghai train station which means I end up standing in three different lines, over 40 minutes in each, until finally shuffling up to the window where I use every Chinese word I know and some I even make up to go with my sign language and thankfully(!), walk out with two tickets (655 yuan each, about $85 ea.) in a soft sleeper, which means a small room with four bunk beds (luxury here in China!). On the way home we hit a Pizza Hut and have a huge Supreme, original crust, and some Heinekens to celebrate our fleetfootedness!

Yesterday. We are feeling quite worldly and pleased with ourselves as we haggle with the vendors around the train station and pick Jenny up two sexy, hippie-traveling-the-globe sort of way, gauze skirts that you see on granola-eating tree huggers everywhere these days. We roll our little caravan luggage to the station and then calmly and efficiently jostle and elbow our way in the early Spring Shanghai heat through the crowds to the immigration screening and deportation process to get over to the Special Administrative Region known as Hong Kong.

Once screened, departure-formless, stamped, and approved, we are herded through a maze of tunnels and end up pushing our way to the front in the waiting room, nestle in with our luggage and look at our passports.

We giggle like school kids on an all-day field trip as we compare passports. The blue, black, pink stamps and seals and visas, all in different languages and codes, are beginning to look like the graffiti of jet-setters, world-travelers, explorers. I take a light nap while Jenny reads up on our destination and a few hours later we are rolling our luggage through a puddle of urine left by a toddler who couldn’t wait, and why should he(!), find our sleeper car, and are elated when we meet our traveling bunk mates, a young couple from Argentina, who speak better than average English, who are backpacking their way down to Thailand, from Shanghai via Hong Kong.

So we had a good train trip, got to speak some English and catch up on a few episodes of our latest obsession, ABC's Lost!, and now we are putting our first evening in Hong Kong together, after a much needed nap.

Talk soon...