Saturday 2010-08-14

Michele woke up about 5:00 this morning thinking of all the things she wanted to type – so she got up while Charles' slept. Then we switched and slept while he worked :-).

Saturday was a full day – even though we really only did two things! We first went down and explored around the hotel looking for a place to eat breakfast. We finally found one, but were disappointed with the fare. It ended up being a Chinese version of a fast food restaurant. The food was served to us almost immediately, and was Chinese (as opposed to being an American fast food restaurant) but it was pretty low quality. Charles was disappointed that his sausage ended up being nothing more than plain cheap hotdog :-).

Hong Kong's underground train system is what every big city imagines having. It's efficiency and quality are beyond superb – they are unbelievable. The trains run every two minutes in most places 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Even the escalators in the terminals are designed to move people quickly – they are much faster than what we have in America. The trains run mostly underground in the city and drop you off at just about any place you want to go. They have designed the terminals so that it's easy in most cases to hop from one train to the next. It truly is amazing. Even the ventilation in the train is excellent.

After breakfast we went up and changed and headed over to the temple. It took us about an hour to get there from our hotel. Things are so different here than at home – we think of “time” as the amount of time in the car to get somewhere. We took the MTR (the underground train system) there, but the actual train travel time is pretty short – maybe 15 minutes or so was actually spent on the train. The rest of the time was spent getting to the station, transferring trains and getting from the station to the temple. The weather was miserably hot and sticky, and we had to walk up hill to get to the temple (but at least this time we didn't have a bunch of luggage!). It felt so good to finally get inside the cool air-conditioned temple. The temple was small, but the Spirit was strong and the people very friendly.

As we were coming out of the temple a young woman asked, in obviously native English, where we were from. We struck up a great conversation. She was from Alberta, Canada and had spent the last year and a half in Hong Kong as an English teacher. She had been to the temple for the first time, in Alberta, just a couple of weeks before. She lived in Hong Kong, not too far from our hotel and told us how to get to church. Her name was Laura and she was very friendly. She looked like her heritage was Jamaican and she said that she was adopted (natively from Canada). We walked with her back to the MTR station. Then we headed back to the hotel and on the way stopped at a grocery store and bought groceries for snacks as well as breakfast and lunch for Sunday so that we wouldn't have to go out to eat on Sunday.