Last week I got on a plane to come back to the X. What happened the three days before will be forever locked in my memory. I met my friends at a hotel to grab a bus to the airport on Wednesday. We need3e to go and renew our visas. Everyone was smiling, laughing, and some are singing “I’m Proud to be an American.” We all loaded onto the bus with hopes and dreams of a night of adventure in HK. What would we do? What would we see? What would we eat?
We got to the airport and went to collect our tickets. The woman at the desk told us, “Here are your tickets to HK but your flight back has been canceled.” Okay, whatever, we will just get new flights once we get to HK.
The flight was very nice, I slept, watched some tv, and they gave us ice cream. We flew in as the sun was setting and I took some awesome pictures of the view. We arrived and tried and get some new flights. It turns out a typhoon was about to hit HK. The next available flight would be on Sunday. This is when I asked God, “Please help me get through this.”
We got on our bus to go to our hostel for the night. I scrambled to get a phone number for the one family I know that lives in HK. I get the number and called. “Hey Liz, This is Merlin. So I’m in HK and might be stuck here for a few days. Is there any way a couple of my friends and I could stay at your house for a night?” She says “Sure! How many people?” I say “…Eleven…” She responds “Oh…” I tell her we don’t need beds or anything just a roof over our heads and she says that’s fine. I’m like awesome she said yes now let me get off the phone before she changes her mind.
We got to the hostel. There we were told, “You booked for tomorrow night, not tonight.” We said, “Excuse me?” So now we scrambled to find a place to sleep. We met this woman who had to rooms but for $1000 in HK dollars. These weren’t the nicest hostels so that’s a little expensive. She wouldn’t budge on her price. We leftave to go find a different place. We got to the next hostel and it was closed. We went to the next one and it was closed too. We went back to the woman. She now told us she is closed but we beg a little and she sells us the rooms.
We got to the hostel. The rooms were pretty small but we could all squeeze in. We loaded everyone in. The lady who runs the place said, “No, only three per room!” ,Of course she didn’t speak a lick of English. I just understood that through an impromptu game of charades. If we all want to sleep here we have to pay her more money. We don’t want to do that so some brave souls left to go sleep in McDonald’s.
The next morning we wake up, get out of there, and go to Starbucks. We checked at the hostel make sure we are all good for the upcoming night. The typhone has now arrived. We went to a mall for shelter. We spent the day there going up and down really long escalators. We went back to the hostel to spend the night.
The next day the sun was out and we went to go meet my friend Liz. We easily found the subway station. We easily got on the train and found Liz. I let out a huge sigh of relief. We all crammed into her van and headed to her house.
Now I kind of assumed the house would be nice but it was beautiful. I don’t know if its just because all the hectic stuff that went through prior, but this place was like a safe haven/resort/America.
Her kids were awesome. They played with us and spoke English and were really nice. We ate spaghetti and salad. So gooooood! Then she had a small gr0up come over and we sang and talked about prayer. It was awesome. We stayed up late playing a hilarious game with my friends and Liz’s oldest daughter. When we went to bed, the pillow was soft. In Asia I don’t have a soft pillow so this was magical. I slept like a baby. I woke up, packed, and was ready to leave. Liz took us to thr train station. We said our farewells and thanked her again, got on a bus, and went to the airport. We got on our plane and left HK.
There was no singing on the bus ride home. This trip was one to remember but there’s a saying that I like and I think it applies to this trip rather well. “All’s well that ends well.”