The China Diary (1 of 10)

A recent post of mine brought me to reminisce over a photo album that's been sitting around in my basement.  Looking back at 1989, it's startling even for me to see how much hair I had.

Tucked into the front of the album is the small, blue Travel Diary that my mom made me take to record some of the events from the two-week trip.  I thought it would be neat to turn that into a brief series of posts here as a bit of a blast from my past... 17 years ago.

I have ten entries in the diary, so will place them here over the next ten days.  If I can get a reasonable facsimile of some of the pics, I'll post a few of them here too.

An interesting factoid about the end of that trip:
We left Beijing to head home just two weeks before the onset of the Tiananmen Square protest.

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Saturday, 18th March 1989
Regal Riverside Hotel
Hong Kong

Today I got up and had breakfast in the Boulevard Cafe beside the main lobby.  I've had better food before.  One note on yesterday: the definition of torture is sitting in economy for 13 and a half hours and only getting up 3 times.  The meals didn't help much either.  But back to today.  After breakfast we left on a tour of the city and went up to Hong Kong's highest point but couldn't see a thing because the fog was thick enough to lay bricks with.  We then took the tram down, then took a Sam-Pan to the Jumbo Floating Restaurant and had our first Chinese meal.  We then started off back to the hotel and got dropped off before we got there.  We then took off in groups and went shopping.  Mr. M, John and I found an awesome arcade with a McDonald's attached to it, so we played a few games, had our dinner, then wandered the town and took a shuttle bus back to the hotel at about 9 PM.  I then cashed some more travellers cheques and came up to my room and began to write what you see before you.  I'm probably going to go to bed now, so I'll see you on the next page; goodnight.

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Yes, it really was just one long paragraph.  The rest of them will be like that too.  I'll intersperse these with other, real life, posts as they come to me.  Can't live in the past all the time.

Comments

[Mark]

This is great stuff. Let me just be the first to say, "You beat me to it, you bastidge."

I have been comtemplating posting old handwritten journal entries. You have a good idea in keeping on with present day posts. When I posted my Bessie story in a serialized form, I missed my regular posts.

[Paula]

Pictures, please ;)

[Linda]

Today at work I was pondering what I should post today and thought it might be fun to present myself as I was at fourteen, a really "telling" stage of my life. Weird that you should post this interesting part of your teenhood. I pooh-pooh people who pooh-pooh people for looking at the past maybe a bit too much. It's a big part of what makes us who we are now and sometimes, dammit, it's just fun. Looking forward to reading about the rest of your adventure. And I'm dying to see the hair ;-)