Day #1: The Little Wiener Things

I'm awake. It's about 3:00 am Chinese standard time.  The bed I'm lying in is small, barely a double, in a hotel room that's not much bigger.  I'm on the 12th floor of the the Mirador Mansion on Nathan Rd., Kowloon, Hong Kong.  The name of the guest house is "The Cosmic."  Outside, our open window, I can hear late night revelers staggering home, laughing drunkenly and stumbling over things noisily.  A little of the chatter is in English most is either in Mandarin or Cantonese, neither of which I speak.  The air through the window is cool and most and smells of Victoria harbor about a quarter of a mile to the South.  A sharp hunger in my belly has woken me.  It's getting to be about dinner time back in my hometown of Topeka, Kansas, USA and my body is not about to let me forget it.

As I sit, my fiancee, who I've been dating for a year, stirs in her sleep next to me, "Are  you Okay?"  She mumbles.  "Yeah,"  I whisper back, "just hungry."  While I spent most of the last 36 hours on airplanes, she spent it on trains, busses, and subways, travelling from Guilin, China to the Hong Kong airport to meet her fiancee, me, at exactly 8:05 pm on February 3, 2012.  She's at least as tired as I am but apparently not as hungry.

I shuffle to the end of the bed where Minxi has piled food on an end table.  At first I didn't understand why she packed so much food, but now, at 3:00 am with her and the city sleeping around me, her genius is revealed.  I'm starved, and there a tons of treasures ready for me.  I tear into a package so some kind of wiener looking meat in red, plastic tubes and start smearing it on star shaped crackers.  I don't know the names for any of this and am sure that the meat, a cross between bologna and ham, is pretty gross, but I'm fourteen time zones from home and this stuff is tasting pretty good.

After two tubes of the meat and three sleeves of crackers I'm full.  I consider a trip to the bathroom out in the hall but decide it's just not worth the effort.  I slide back next to Minxi who is still sleeping fitfully and  drift back into dreams filled with the rattle and pressure of the eighteen hours I spent in airplanes yesterday.  Minxi and I have worked so long to make this trip happen, I'm not even wondering just what the hell a homegrown Kansas honky like me is doing in Hong Kong.  It's quite a story.

International romance, online dating, 83 year old war survivors, Trans-Pacific flight.  Hmmm.  Could be a good novel or just the story of Minxi and I, our romance and our love of travel.