April 12th (the first)

I’m currently 15 hours ahead of Pittsburgh time (crazy!) but apparently that’s the limit. Tonight, instead of losing another hour, we’ll actually gain another day! So I get the wonderful pleasure of living through April 12th two days in a row! I’m still a little confused as to how it all works, but all I know is that today is April 12, and I’m ahead of the east coast, and tomorrow will also be April 12, but I’ll be behind east coast time then. WEIRD!

In other news, Taiwan was short-lived, but pretty cool. We stayed in Taipei the 2 days we were there (we docked in a city called Keelung that has nothing going for it really).  A 45 minute train ride to Taipei only cost me a little over a dollar, so that’s pretty awesome.

I was looking forward to being on the ship for a long time to give myself a rest from all of the countries in Asia, but now I’m just bored and getting cabin fever. They have a bunch of activities for us to do to keep us occupied, but I just want to get to Hawaii and then get home. 5 more days at sea, 2 days in Hawaii, 5 more days at sea, San Diego for 3 days, and then I’m home!! So excited, but a little sad at the same time.

Shout out to Kelsey for your 21st birthday!! I know it’s not quite midnight at home yet, but I’m going for a record on how many times I can wish you Happy Birthday in the same day ☺

Vietnam, Cambodia, and China!

Asia was such a blur. Everything went by so fast! I’m used to having a week or so between each port, but since Singapore, we’ve only had 2 days to recover. Quick recap:

Vietnam and Cambodia were HOT, I got a dress made in Vietnam and learned how to cross the street (walk into oncoming traffic and the cars and motorcycles will move around you… pretty sweet concept, but scary!). Cambodia was amazing, but also horrifying. I learned in more detail how the Khmer Rouge government killed millions of Cambodians (a greater percentage than the Holocaust) just because these people were intellectuals and they didn’t want to be overthrown. Angkor Wat temple was beautiful though. So were all of the other temples (like the one that Tomb Raider was filmed in!) I got a fish massage (where little fish ate the dead skin off of my feet!) and probably the best massage of my life for only $10 an hour! The prices in both countries were incredible. I bought more stuff than I can even mention in here and spent under $150 total. Though they aren’t real designer brands, they still seem to be pretty good quality surprisingly, and as the locals joke about it, the things you can buy there are “same same but different”

China was beyond awesome! Hong Kong (where we stopped first) had a beautiful skyline, especially at night. We went up on an incline to a mountain to see everything from high up. It reminded me of Mt. Washington! (I miss home). The rugby sevens was going on when we got there, so we got to meet a lot of British and Irish people there to celebrate which was a lot of fun!

I flew to Beijing (my flight was awesome by the way—we even got to watch our takeoff from a camera on the front of the plane on the tv screens on our headrests!) to see the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, the Olympic stadium, and the Great Wall. One of my friends tht was in our group travelling with us fell on the wall and is in pretty bad shape, so please keep her in your prayers! She is slowly making progress though, so there are good signs. I got to hike on the Great Wall, which was literally a hike and very intense. It was so pretty though and indescribably huge—over 4,000 miles total!

Took a sleeper train to Shanghai, and the experience was a million percent better than my India sleeper train. There were only 4 beds per compartment and there was actually a door that even had a lock! The floors were clean and, though I didn’t, I would have felt comfortable walking around barefoot. There were REAL toilets with toilet paper (not the squatter toilets that we were used to that are literally porcelain holes in the ground).

Shanghai’s skyline was even prettier than Hong Kong’s! I went up into this tower (that reminded me of the CN Tower in Toronto) that had a glass floor that was pretty sweet. I met a lot of fun people in Shanghai too; there were a lot of people from England and America that were working in Shanghai. I think it would be a great place to live (too bad I don’t understand Chinese).

Right now, we’re actually docked in Japanese waters because we’re not able to travel straight from China to Taiwan. I hope I’ll get another passport stamp. My passport is looking pretty impressive! We get to Taiwan tomorrow morning!