Symphony of Lights

Hello friends!

Boy, for only living here for a little over three weeks, we are sure busy! I keep trying to post updates for you, but by the time I get home at night, I am so exhausted that I pretty much just fall into bed.

John Paul came home from his trip to Hawaii and the trip to Alaska was cancelled so we were able to enjoy his days off with him here! He brought back some big jugs of Mrs. Butterworth's syrup, a potato masher, and vitamins. Would you believe as soon as he brought back the potato masher I found one just like it at Ikea for about the same price? Oh well!

After JP returned from his trip, we had our first visitor to our apartment! Andrew Young, a pilot also with Airmed and a friend of ours got the 'quick' tour of our apartment before heading to the hotel for some much needed rest. He had been flying all night, so that mixed with jet lag was making him very sleepy! John Paul and I talked his ear off telling him all about what it's like here. Maybe he and his wife Emily and their kids will come to Hong Kong too...that would be fun! :)
Here's a picture of Andrew taking a picture of me taking a picture of him.

And one of him with JP:

Because John Paul's double-entry visa for China ran out, he had to go to the China visa office and apply for another visa. That took two days - one to do all the paperwork, wait in line and drop it off, and another one to pay and pick it up. After we picked up his visa, we went over to the American Embassy to have more pages put in his passport. Since every flight out of Hong Kong is an International flight, he goes through passport pages very quickly.

While we were waiting for the passport pages to be put into his passport, we did a little sight-seeing! We took a tram up the side of a mountain - almost straight up - to see "the Peak." The Peak overlooks Hong Kong and is a beautiful view of the city. We went on a sunny, clear day, so we had a perfect view! Up at the top, there are tons of gift stores, a mall, restaurants and fast-food places. We saw McDonalds, Burger King, Starbucks, Subway and Pizza Hut! Here's a video of John Paul showing you the view:

Here are some more pictures from the Peak:

We had lunch at a restaurant called "Spaghetti 360." I had alfredo with crab and mushrooms and JP had Japanese curry. The food was very good and the view was amazing!


Instead of taking the tram back down the mountain, we decided to take the bus. We sat in the very front of the double-decker bus. I was SO nervous! We were on tiny little roads riding on the "wrong" side of the road with hardly any shoulder and sometimes no shoulder! Whew! Here are some pictures from the bus:

We decided to stick around until 8pm for the Symphony of Lights show. Since we had a few hours to kill, we took the ferry over to Tsim Sha Tsui and looked around. Guess what we found? Yup. CHRISTMAS displays! Everywhere! I guess since they don't have Thanksgiving, there's no reason to wait! I'm seeing Christmas displays everywhere now! We even have lights in our apartment lobby as of yesterday!

Here are some pictures of the Christmas display outside of a mall in TST:

We finished the evening with the "Symphony of Lights." Several buildings downtown have lasers, spotlights or colored lights that "dance" to music. John Paul took a few movie clips of the display:



Here are a few still pictures of it:

On Sunday we went to church in Tuen Mun. It took us over an hour an a half to get there by rail but around 45 minutes to get home by ferry. We met some new friends at that church - in fact 4 of them had gone to school at Bob Jones University! The church is primarily in Cantonese, but they have a few English-speaking families who go there so much of the service is translated into English. This past Sunday, one of the guys from the U.S. was preaching, so the sermon was in English and translated into Cantonese.

In case you don't think we could have fit anything else into our schedule, John Paul and I also crammed in some shopping this week for our apartment (printer, laundry basket, garbage can, etc), going to a concert and going out for dinner. Mary Wu, the pianist I mentioned in another post, performed tonight with a violinist. They were wonderful! I'm looking forward to hearing Mary play again in a few weeks.

It will be more difficult catching you on skype now that your time changed. Sadly, we didn't change times with daylight savings, so we are now 13 hours ahead of eastern time zone and 14 hours ahead of central time zone. Hopefully I can still catch some of you early-risers or night-owls!