the only way to fly/12 hours in tsim sha tsui

I ended up having to fly coach from Minneapolis to Newark in order to make my Hong Kong connection, but that was OK—I’d rather have been slightly uncomfortable than miss my flight to HK.

The Newark to HK leg was my first opportunity to experience business class, which is even better than first class, based on my couple of experiences with that. The seats almost fully reclined, and had motorized controls for every part of the seat, from leg support to lumbar support. I was offered a drink as soon as I got on board, and was served a multi-course meal not long after take-off. The meal consisted of a duck breast appetizer, a salad, bread, New York strip steak with white and green asparagus, and an ice cream sundae for dessert. Of course, these were just my selections—there were multiple selections available for each course, and the stewardesses frequently asked if I’d like to sample multiple selections. Over the course of the meal, I was asked at least 15 times if I wanted something more to drink or eat. The service really was great. We were later served a breakfast meal just before we landed—kind of strange considering the fact that we were landing at 7:00 in the evening, but I guess the plane was running on New Jersey time.

The flight itself was really interesting. I’ve long known that most Asia flights take a course that goes over Alaska, which seems strange if you’re used to normal maps, but makes sense when you factor in the curvature of the earth. In the case of this flight, however, since we departed from the East Coast, we flew north over the Canadian maritime provinces, then over Greenland and the Arctic Circle, then down through eastern Russia, Mongolia and finally China. The weather was very clear over Canada, Greenland and the Arctic Circle, so I saw some amazing terrain like I’ve never seen before, except on TV—ice fields, snow-covered mountains and plains as far as the eye can see, large cracking sheets of ice over the Arctic Ocean, etc. In many ways, the view from my window was the best part of the flight.

We arrived in HK on time, and I was greeted at the airport by my friend, Venus. I first met Venus in 1997 when I was teaching English classes as a missionary in the Kwun Tong district of HK. We’ve kept in touch ever since that summer, and this was the first time that we’d seen each other since 2000. We stopped first at my hotel in Tsim Sha Tsui, and then took a taxi over to the Star Ferry so that I could take some pictures of Victoria Harbour. I’m glad to finally have some decent digital photos of it (I didn’t buy my first digital camera until after my last trip to China, nine years ago), and it was really cool to see again. The island side of HK has one of the coolest skylines of any city in the world.





After we wandered around the ferry pier for a while, we went to dinner at a Shanghai-style vegetarian restaurant. Vegetarian places would normally not be my first choice, but it was actually pretty good and it was good to try something new. I just wish I’d had more of an appetite. Venus ordered a ton of food (she probably thought I still had the voracious appetite of my under-nourished missionary days), but I was jet-lagged and tired. Still, it was fun to go out, have some good food and to talk. My Cantonese is definitely rusty, but about 90% of the conversation was in Cantonese, so it’s still serviceable if a bit child-like.



Hopefully the jet lag will go away soon. I didn’t get back to my hotel until after 11pm, and only slept until 3am. I’m crossing the border into Shenzhen in a few hours, and then have meetings until late afternoon, when I’ll get on another plane to go to the city of Xiamen, in southeastern China. Good times.

And now, some random photos from the streets of Tsim Sha Tsui for Holly (since I doubt the rest of you know what that is):