the day i turned 31

the day i turned 31 we landed on mainland china. so i have a stamp in my passport with my birthday on it. this makes me happy.

the day i turned 31 we were stopped by chinese customs agents who went through our suitcases claiming they were looking for "magazines." we didn't have any. once they were satisfied, one of the agents said to us, "you are tourists?" we said, "yes." he said, "welcome to china" in a way that sounded both friendly and ominous. we just smiled and walked away. quickly.

the day i turned 31, we visited the sun and moon pagodas in guilin and went to an acrobat show (term used loosely).

the day i turned 31 we bought two pieces of individually wrapped cake and, after 15 minutes of gesturing to communicate that we wanted them for takeaway (we finally resorted to pointing to the phrase in our mandarin-english phrase book) we took them back to our hotel room and celebrated. we even splurged on a soda from the minibar.

the thing i learned this year is that even the worst most hard and horrible thing i can imagine, if it happens, can be endured and, actually, endured well. my goal for the next year is to avoid living in fear of the next worst most hard and horrible thing that might be around the corner and instead enjoy the wonderful, happy and good things that make up the bulk of my life. realistically speaking, bad and hard things are inevitable. so really there is no sense in being worried about and braced against them all the time. especially because good things are inevitable, too. and i certainly have been blessed with more than my fair share of those.

king of (hong) kong

our first stop was hong kong, where my old mission companion michelle was the perfect hostess, not to mention a total trooper spending all day out and about with us with a baby in tow. i loved seeing hong kong, but i loved catching up with her and meeting her little family just as much.

with michelle as our guide we hit all the must-sees, including...

macau, a former portugese settlement that is actually a different country even though it's just an hour-long ferry ride away, which meant more stamps in our passport. hurrah! the portugese had the good sense to list all their historical sites with unesco before they transferred power back to the chinese in the 1990s, so all the old historical buildings are still standing. there are also a lot of casinos. we didn't bother with those.

hong kong island is basically a big mountain, and you can take a tram up to the peak and look out over all the splendor. so, we did.

and, if you happen to need to travel from the residential mid-levels to the business district, known as central, you can just take the commuter escalator. during morning rush-hour it goes down, transporting all the morning commuters, and for the rest of the day it runs up, bringing everyone back home. i thought it was basically the coolest, most brilliant thing i had ever seen.

we also hit some downtown markets (one for knock-offs, one for jade),

watched the famous hong kong light show (in the rain!) and then took the famous star ferry home,

and took a cable car to the world's largest seated outdoor bronze budhha, all those qualifiers being really important as without any one of them he wouldn't qualify as the world's largest anymore.

hong kong was an easy place to visit and a great place to get our feet wet. after three glorious days there, our adventure was well under way.

home again, home again.

we are back! and i have to say, no matter how fabulous a trip is, it always feels so good to come home. especially when coming home means tap water that won't make you sick, and toilets you can sit on instead of squat over.

we started out our trip feeling like this:

and after two solid weeks of sight-seeing, haggling, gesturing, exchange rate calculating and worrying about the rash that appeared on my legs around the second day of our trip, we pretty much felt like this:

we survived thanks to a lot of this:

and it was pretty much the best trip to china ever.

china was full of unexpected surprises, most of them good. there was a lot more english around than we were expecting, which was awesome. it never ceased to amaze us how cheap things were, which was also awesome. and everywhere we went felt remarkably clean, especially considering the inordinately large volume of people, and the fact that about 110 percent of them smoke.

i had also forgotten a little asian quirk, which is that asians LOVE to have their picture taken with white people. for the first couple days of our trip we were staying with my friend michelle in hong kong, and kicking around with her and her little baby, simon, so we thought maybe asians just love adorable white babies (see exhibits a and b, below):

but, once we got to the mainland we realized any white person, adorable baby or not would do. we were probably approached at least once a day to pose for a photo. and sometimes people just jumped into photos we were already taking of ourselves (see exhibit c):

when we mentioned this phenomenon to one of our tour guides he said, "yes, this is happen a lot in china."

indeed.

we didn't mind it, actually, unless the photo bombers then trapped us while "making conversation" (read: practicing their english) and trying to convince us to go somewhere with them so we could all "talk together" (read: so they could keep practicing their english). then it just got annoying. after a few times of falling for that trick, we just starting walking away when we heard the tell-tale question, "where are you from?" we'd just shout "the united states!" over our shoulder and skedaddle.

all in all, though, i couldn't have asked for a better time and, as my grammie said, i am so glad AWD came along in time to share it with me. it was a heckuva way to kick off year two together, and there's lots more to share. but for now, i am going to squeeze in one more nap.