Hong Kong

One of my favorite things about this competition is that it takes you places you would not necessarily go on your own. Hong Kong is cool. It's a big city-a little dirty-very crowded. We arrived Sunday --- and went to "scavenging" I'm not as good at this as I thought I would be. I'm a great traveler and good with riddles and such ... but I am terrible with directions. Terrible. After living in Pensacola for 15 years I still get lost a few times a month. Thankfully Travis is a navigational expert --- so my big role thus far in this has been to scope out the nice strangers to help us figure out the clues and eat the god awful food challenges (I'm not a squimish eater but I still found myself gagging and spitting food onto the street twice yesterday) while Trav maps out where we should go. It's funny because he has taken to treating me a bit like I treat Lyric walking around.  He is constantly having to grab my arm to keep me from walking the wrong way or into traffic. Much like NYC the key to Hong Kong is mastering the Subways (plus communicating with a cabbie here? Not so easy).



I'm very impressed with the kindness of the people in Hong Kong. Yesterday a 17 year old high school student sat in Starbucks (if only finding good coffee were a scavenge ...) with us for an hour and helped us figure out our clues. He kept apologizing for his English being a bit broken. My goal is for Lyric to be as kind and intelligent as this boy when she's a teenager.


We have done so much in the last two days. Yesterday while looking for a 1000 year old egg we passed a Buddhist prayer temple. We went in and lit incense and wrote a prayer note for the health of our children. I got chill bumps as the monks hit a big bell and chanted prayers for our prayers. It was one of my favorite things so far.


The competition is much physically harder than I thought it would be ... after being out and about for 5 hours yesterday I crashed (we forgot to eat lunch and my blood sugar was 0). We took a few hour break to swim at the hotel ( and eat cookies!). I'm very impressed with how hard the other teams went. Rainey and Zoe as well as Heidi and Lily went straight from 8am-10pm yesterday-no breaks ... hardcore


! I miss my baby but luckily my family knows how to handle me and sends hour by hour updates "Lyric ate applesauce, then laughed with Janey-then she took a 2 ½ hour nap wearing her pink pig pjs ...." Trav said she needs a twitter account (ha). I'm still a little jetlagged so although I have a lot to write about-I don't have any ability to do so clearly ... So ... I will end this here. We leave for Vietnam in a few hours ... I'm stoked