I'm baaaaaaack!

Well, it's been quite a while since my last blog post, more than a year in fact, but I'm back in action.  I've been meaning to take time to delete out all my old blog posts about how much I hated working on my dissertation, the ones about how much I was in love with that guy, and my favorite - the ones where I freaked out about never getting a job. Being in Hong Kong spurred me on to get serious about clearing the old posts out and writing a travel blog while I'm abroad this summer instead of posting everything to Facebook. This way I can take a step away from Facebook and share with the broader group of my friends and family who expressed an interest in hearing about what's going on in Asia.

So... here it is. My travel blog for the summer of 2014.

My plan is to do a bunch of short little posts as often as I can, when I have something to say.  I'll post tons of pictures with comments and little snippets here and there that don't seem to have any rhyme or reason, but are what I can post when I have time. I'll kick this off with a few pictures.  I have about five days of material to catch up on, but I'm still getting used to the time change and am working all day, so it would be a bit ambition of me to think I could do a whole ton of it tonight.

This is a picture of the sunrise from the plane ride somewhere over China. 

I laughed a lot and had to take a picture because on my Air China flight I was served yogurt made in Western NY. 

This is my half-eaten breakfast from my Air China flight. This shouldn't have been a surprise to me I guess, but my breakfast was a tray of chicken, rice, and vegetables.  Combinations of rice and a meat are served at pretty much every meal here. 

As we approach Beijing the fog and smog took over so the sunrise wasn't quite as bright. The picture doesn't do the scenery much justice, but to see the mountain peak out of the clouds with the sun rising was absolutely breath-taking. 

This was the picture from my window seat as we landed in Beijing (where I connected to Hong Kong).  It was incredibly foggy and even though it looks like the window is all steamed up in this picture, it wasn't. That was the fog. Of course there's a fair amount of smog in this picture too, but this a lot of fog.

I made it to Hong Kong! With my travel pack and my back pack clipped on to the front, I think I look like a real world traveler. I also think that I don't look too shabby for just having traveled for 34 hours.