Virtual China '98

Welcome to Virtual China 1998:

Fischer’s Biking Group reporting in!

4/19/98

Day 1

This is Ryan Leveque reporting in for Virtual China on April 19, 1998. Whew!!!! What a day. Waking up at 5:30 in the morning is like a nightmare!!! I have never been so tired in my life, well not that tired.

When I was dropped off at the school, I was REALLY anxious! The excitement of the trip was flowing throughout me. One other thing that I hated was lugging my bag around. It takes a lot of muscle but I managed it. Later on when we were boarding the boat, everyone was talking constantly. After a short 4 hours on the high speed ferry, (in my opinion) everyone was psyched to go biking. Our happiness was soon spoiled when it started raining violently. It later lightened up to our delight. We then dropped our luggage on the bus, picked up our "odd of assortment" bikes, then we were on our way…..

Today I went to a village full with lots of children and this is my perspective on what child from a village thought of us:

These weird looking people pulled in. I was scared because I’ve never saw these strange big-headed picture taking red T-shirt wearing aliens(strangers) before. They had cameras and they wanted to take pictures of my family and me. This tall lady gave me a sticky heart shaped piece of paper. I still have it on the top part of my hand. My mom invited them for tea but they said they were running out of time. They left the house and walked to the other end of the village. They looked around and took a lot more pictures.

Where ever the strangers went my family and me would follow. They went in to another one of our village houses and took some more pictures of us. We asked them if they wanted some tea again. But again they turned a nice drink of hot tea down. They left the house and started saying their "good-byes" and left our village. It was scary and fun because even though they were strangers they were really nice.

Perhaps some of the only relaxation we will have experienced by the end of this trip was our ferry ride from Hong Kong to San Bu. Most of us woke us this morning well before 6:00 A.M., as we needed to be at the Kowloon Ferry Terminal on the Kowloon side of Hong Kong harbor by 7:00. Very few of us had ever been inside the terminal building, which is quite newly constructed. We were overwhelmed by its tremendous size - we felt as though we were in an airport! After going through immigration and waiting for about an hour, we boarded the catamaran which would take us to San Bu. I was expecting a much shorter ferry ride than the four hours that we spent going up the delta area of the Pearl River.

My friends and I played cards for the majority of the trip (hearts to be specific), while others who were not lucky enough to have a deck talked among themselves. Our arrival in San Bu was announced be a sudden onrush of chatter among the Chinese passengers. We were happy to be there, but our emotions turned into disappointment when we heard that we had a one-hour-long immigration line to go through on the Chinese side of the border. Unfortunately, I was last in line so I was only able to try out my bicycle well after some had gotten theirs. Most of us are happy with our bikes, and other than a few minor adjustments none were too problematic. From the looks of our first morning in China, I think we are going to have a very good time.

Around 2:30-3:00, we started biking into the country. There was a lot of traffic, and the drivers were beeping their horns like crazy. While we were biking along, we saw many rice patties. They are so green and pretty. When we were in the countryside, we came up into a village called "Pu Hong". There were about 100 people in one village, and each family had an average of 4 people. There are about 12 families in one village. A normal house would have 2 floors, with 2 rooms on each floor. The children were afraid of us. They didn't seem to be used to foreigners like us. After a while, they got used to us and accepted Mrs. Buchner's gifts, which were stickers of animals and hearts. They really liked the stickers. I don't think that they have ever seen these before!

Near the houses, there were brown, speckled chickens running around free and making weird cackling noises.

All in all, today was a pretty good day, even though it rained quite a bit! We also got very muddy.

Moderator:

Technology Coordinator

Hong Kong International School (M.S. Div.)

Hong Kong, China

Fax: 852-2899-0809

"The wise teacher does not ask you to enter the house of his wisdom, he leads you to the threshold of your own mind." Kahlil Gibran