Thursday, May 24, 2012

Hello Hong Kong


A send off at Sea Tac
Well we made it. After almost 24 hours of traveling, with over 14 hours in an actual airplane, we were so grateful to open the door to our hotel room in Hong Kong, schlep our bags inside, and sink deep into the white duvet cover on the bed.

Our flight left Seattle at just after 2pm on Wednesday. My dad took us to the airport, dropped us, and gave us one final round of hugs, and then we were on our own.  But it wasn’t until the doors shut with a thud on our Boeing 777 that I truly felt the enormity of what is ahead of us.

Aaron pulls luggage from the car
The next time we step foot on United States soil, I thought, we’ll have Matthew in our arms.

When we landed in Seoul, Korea, our layover destination, we knew we were truly traveling abroad.

I spent a short stint in the Seoul airport back in 1991 when my family came to Korea to visit my sister’s birth country and to meet some of the people who had cared for her during her first six years. For some reason there were complications with our departing flight, and we spent many extra hours (my memory has it as an overnight, in fact) in the Seoul airport. I was anxious to see if I remembered anything of that place.

Well, 21 years later the Seoul airport was NOT anything like I remember it, but just being in Korea felt so familiar—the sound of people speaking, the Korean characters that comprise its written language, the smells, the food—I had some very vivid flashbacks to traveling with my family in Asian when I was just 15, and mostly it was a calm sense of remembrance I experienced. What was the most obvious to me, however, was that we were now the minority, with our pale white skin and our American accents. We had landed in Asia!

After a 2 hour layover, we boarded another plane and flew another three hours to Hong Kong. By the time we were finally off the plane and through Customs and Immigration, it was almost 8:00 a.m. on Thursday morning at home, which was 11 p.m. Thursday night here in Hong Kong. We were wiped, but so happy to be here.

We followed the line of people to the taxis, and when we came through that huge ramp down toward the taxi loading area, the tropical weather hit us—heat, humidity, and the smells of a big Asian city. There was something familiar about the temperatures and the smell of exhaust mingling with cigarette smoke.

“Just four days, and we’ll have our boy,” I told Aaron. He nodded with a kind of weary excitement.

So here we are: Hong Kong. We’ll spend today and tomorrow (Friday and Saturday) sightseeing and being with a friend who worked on staff with us at Camp Lutherwood back in 1998. Her name is Rebecca, and she teaches English here at the Lutheran Seminary. She’ll be our tour guide and a familiar face to acquaint us with this new city.

There’s a quote I love that I discovered back in my college days while exploring a bookstore with my good friend Aimee. It was the first thing in my mind as I rode in a taxi through downtown Hong Kong last night:

I am not the same, having seen the moon shine on the other side of the world.

Well, the moon wasn’t shining last night, not as far as I can see, but the quote is a reminder to me that being in other places changes us in ways we can’t even really imagine.

And even thought I sit here in this hotel room with the familiar presence of my husband beside me, typing away while he reads his book (something VERY normal for us), I can look out the window and see this vast city—a fusion of East meets West in the way only Hong Kong is—and I can’t help but feel like we’re on the verge of becoming something new—something more of ourselves—because of this amazing adventure.



A bleary-eyed shot after finally landing in Hong Kong

1 comment:

  1. You two look remarkably fresh after loooong days of travel. Happy touring today!

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