Time Travel

My days in India were full & my nights were dedicated to reading bedtime stories, catching frogs, enjoying my bucket showers, & trying to sleep on my lovely technicolor Indian mattress. But now I'm back in the USA! I have access to high-speed internet, a couple hours to kill between classes, & 1711 pictures in my India album. Cue epic blog update full of pictures.



I spent 14.5 hours on this 747, which we christened "Bertha." Twas a very large plane.



Luckily, I had a window seat - this was the view from above the clouds.



This was the view about 5 hours later. Please notice how the clouds & shadows look almost exactly the same? Yeah, it stayed like that for about 12 hours of the 14.5. It really messes with your head when the sun stops moving. We were traveling along with the sun, so it stayed at about the same position even though we technically flew through Friday & Saturday.




They did feed us rather well - we had a menu to choose from & everything. Kim & I were pretty excited to eat stir fry chicken with shitake mushrooms & jasmine rice while on a plane to China. Author's Note: When flying with Cathay Pacific, do NOT order the Kosher meal. The regular econo-class food is pretty amazing & much easier to deal with. If you get the Kosher meal, you'll just find yourself sitting in a pile of wrappers & plastic, trying to figure out why they gave you all these packets of mustard to go with fish & roasted turkey. not pleasant.



China! It's very smoggy & mysterious looking, no?

Storytime: The bathrooms in the Hong Kong airport were by far my favorite bathrooms of the entire trip; they were spotlessly clean, the tile, floors, and sinks all have glitter embedded all over them, the toilets were small, very rounded, & somehow very Chinese looking, & each bathroom had a nice little attendant who mopped the floors after each person. It was awesome. Kim & I were in the bathroom freshening up after the arduous flight from San Francisco (we had left Salt Lake City about 25 hours earlier), when the sweet little attendant came in, smiling a crinkly smile, waving her arms, & saying something about the sky. "Come come! See sky! Sky like fire, you see!"

We walked out of the bathroom giggling a bit & trying to communicate our thanks, then we saw this:



It was incredible. I snapped quite a few pictures, but they can't come close to the real colors - the sky truly did look like it was on fire. I loved the architecture in the Hong Kong International Airport - it wins the prize for my favorite airport, which is quite the honor, as I am now quite the expert. I was in an airport 12 times during the course of my trip.