Home Sweet Home

We did it, our big family adventure. Our fantastic, fun, colorful, delicious, exhausting, whirlwind tour adventure of Hong Kong, Macau, China, and Bangkok. 

And for myself, an added emotional adventure outside my neat little box of a world. Am I a changed woman since this awesome trip? Yes and no. I'm still a stickler for time and planning and preparation. I'm still the go-from-point A-to-point B type person. It's just now for every unexpected "leaf" that should fall my way, I know how to walk around it and be ok. :-)

Floating Market in Bangkok

Family picture at the Peak on our last day

All in all a FANTASTIC, glad-not-to-have-missed, worthy-of-truancy-letters life adventure for the whole family. Would not have changed a thing. Well, maybe 2 things:

1.  Not being so late for our modes of transportations and holding up our China tour group (who could not be rid of us soon enough. Pretty sure they hated us by the end of the tour. Can't confirm because was instructed not to make eye contact as we breathlessly boarded the impatient buses and ferries full of glaring people. Luckily they were mostly from HK and not from China. Heard those folks can spit. Literally heard it a few times. In fact, did you know that people there wore face masks not for fear of germs so much as spit? Yikes. The images that thought provokes. Problem is not so bad these days since the fining of public spitting since the Olympic games some years back.)

2.  Not buying out the entire floating market in Bangkok of any and all things my Baht-loaded wallet could buy. Hang the price haggling next time. Jim says it's about the principle of it all. One must haggle or be willing to walk away. Well, next time I know better. It's not about the principle to me. It's about the bottom line: I want it, therefore I will have it.  Because I will not wait another 35 years to taste the fruit of my childhood. Alas, in this trip it was an opportunity missed. Never again. I will be back Bangkok!

HK skyline taken from the highest point: The Peak

Good to be home. But already we miss HK and family there.