You want copy watch or copy bag?

Who needs an alarm clock when mother nature will more than happily wake you up at 6AM with Raucous storms.... They were phenomenal thunderstorms. We woke up yesterday and spent the morning getting ready having a leisurely breakfast and so on and then around 10 we headed out to catch the subway. We took the subway to the Salisbury YMCA to meet Professor Bays and his wife who both work at Calvin and were kind enough to offer to take us out for lunch. So went to the pound to pick out our lunch... juuuust kidding we actually went to the spaghetti house. A little Amerasian or maybe more Amitasian ( American Italian Asian) They served a little bit of everything but really a whole lot of seafood and a whole lot of Italian food. It was quite interesting.

We had lots of pleasant conversation and a very fun time and after a very nice lunch
Mrs. Bays walked us down to where the market was where we could do some shopping while Mr. Bays walked back to get their luggage. We walked around and the markets and stored for probably a good hour or hour and a half and it's amazing because you see everything from Gucci and Tiffany's to this little side alley's full of street vendors with tons of just stuff! And the funniest part was - which Mrs. Bays had warned us about- the people who come up to you and say" you want copy watch or copy bag" and they just get right up in your face and are extremely persistent... After an unsuccessful shopping trip ( it was more of a fact finding mission in the words of my mother) we decided to continue on and explore some more. We knew if we headed home we would all want to sleep and at this point we're still all adjusting to the time so sleeping at 2:00 in the afternoon likely won't help that too much...

We walked down to the Avenue of the stars which is like Hollywood Blvd. but in Hong Kong. It has starts like Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee and stuff like that it's quite fun, so we wandered around there and took lots of pictures like tourists and of course we took some jumping pictures. I mean as if we weren't literally standing out above the crowd enough we decided it would be fun to jump.. It was fun. After we'd exhausted the Avenue of the Stars we took the ferry across to Central which is the area where our flat is. After a bit of searching and the successful purchase of a very strange umbrella in the process we ended up at the revolving restaurant which literally did revolve it was up on the highest level it was amazing you could see the harbor, the peak, tons of buildings and in general just survey the city. We sat and enjoyed a cool libation. It was quite enjoyable. We hiked it back up the mountain to our casa and after some hanging out decided to watch a movie which I proceeded to fall asleep during the first 5 minutes...None less it was a great day I'll add some pictures from today and a few from yesterday as well.

Also as I mentioned previously illness is taken very seriously here more specically the swine flu, and because of that our first week of camp was canceled beacuse of a swine flu case in the school. The goverment closed the school for 2 weeks so we will still run a school but it will likely be for a smaller group and we are not praying that we are all healthy. Also that this doesn't happen in any of our other school. The 2 weeks is conditional. The goverment could decide not to reopen the school in 2 weeks in which case we wouldn't even get to run the camp there which would be a major disappointment. Your prayers for health for us and within the schools would be appreciated. Thanks! missing you all a lot! Love

To see pictures visit http://tinawestra.shutterfly.com/

Tina