36 Hours of Travel

I began the trip early Friday morning at the Greyhound Station. I took the bus from Cleveland to Pitt, and checked in with everybody else and just hung around for the day.

We then spent the night at Pitt, and left for the Pittsburgh Airport at 6am on Saturday. We flew to O'Hare Airport in Chicago, only about a 2 hour flight. We then had a layover in Chicago, and then then had the big 15 hour flight to Hong Kong (random fact that I learned was that Hong Kong is actually kind of a province of China).

Long Story short: 15 hours on a plane is actually not that bad. Well the main reason for this was because the plane had great movie selections, with pretty much every Oscar nominated film this past year available to watch for free. I watched Whiplash (so good), Boyhood (also very good), and a third movie that I can't remember so it probably wasn't that good. Once I was done with this, I took some Benadryl to knock myself out for the rest of the flight. Next thing I knew, we had landed in Hong Kong.

Our Layover in HK was about 3 hours long. This was actually nice because it gave us time to sit down and eat some real food. We then boarded on our flight to Ho Chi Minh City, which was about two and a half hours. I pretty much slept the whole time on this flight.

When we got out of the airport, the first thing that greeted us was a wave of humidity. Dr. Berman told us this many times this past semester, but its one of those things that - until you feel it - you can't fully imagine it. We took a bus to the hotel, and got a quick glimpse of the streets and people in the city as we drove.

The hotel is very nice, and our third floor room even has a balcony overlooking the street out front. We were welcomed by a fully stocked fridge, which unlike American Hotels, the things on the inside were very cheap. For perspective, 1 can of Coke is equivalent to a 15 cent charge...something that would probably be $5 in an American Hotel. Tomorrow starts early, so about to get a good night sleep (its a little after 2 am here right now).

In Hong Kong, as seen in the picture, there are lots of mountains surrounding the airport which look really cool.

This sign was taken on the bus, so sorry for the blur. The "40" represents the 40th anniversary of the US pulling out of Vietnam, which is a really big holiday here. Signs like these were scattered all across the city on the drive to the hotel.