Asia Adventure - Post 1 (a new hope)

Since I spent two weeks in Asia with some very awesome fun people, I have a mad amount of stories to share. I'll have to break it up by day I think to do it justice.

Our flight was from New York straight to Hong Kong. 15 hours! 15 long long long hours. Actually, I had to fly to New York from Chicago, so I spent about 18 hours on a plane. I didn't sleep one bit and the sucky movie choices just added to the fustration. You know it is bad when they are only showing four movies (in a constant rotation) and the least lame one is Mrs. Petigre lives for a day. In all, I probably was awake for a solid 28 hours.

While standing in line to check in, Dana met "Jersey Mark". He happens to be on our flight to Hong Kong. During the flight, a group of guys amass at the rear of the plane and drink like it is going out of style. Basically it was one mile-high sausage fest. They were trying to get some female companions because one remarked to Olga as she passed by, "hey, do you want to party with us". She noticed that the seat back pocket was jammed full of wine bottles. Eventually the captain came over the speaker and told everyone to take their seats because turbulance was ahead. Well there was zero turbulance, and we all think they were looking for a way to kindly break up the party.

When we laded in Hong Kong, it looked like we were landing on water. Scary, but cool nontheless. Sadly, my luggage didn't follow me. I guess the THREE HOUR layover between Chicago and New York was not enough time for them to take one bag off the plane and put it on another. ONE BAG! Luckily I had one change of clothes and three pair of underwear to sustain me until it arrived. At first they said it would take three days to get here as if it was on a slow boat from China....wait to China....whatever.

The highlight of my travel was flying over the North Pole. Our route took us up over Canada and a part of Greenland, over the North Pole, down through Siberia and mainland China. Since I was WIDE AWAKE the entire trip, I was able to see the massive iceburgs around Greenland and the calm ice environment of the artic. Here are the pictures of the North Pole (well according to our flight tracker, we were approximately over it at the time).