Time Travel is Possible

So, on Tuesday, February 23, around dinner time, we got a ride to the San Francisco airport with Katie's sister, Hillary. We flew to Los Angeles and met up with the other volunteers in our ILP group. Our next flight took off just past midnight, at 12:10 am (on Feb. 24). The flight lasted about 12 hours, and we landed in Seoul, Korea around 12 noon... California time. But in Korea, the local time was about 6 hours earlier than in California, so the clocks read 6 am. BUT since we crossed the international dateline in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, we did not land at 6 am on February 24. We landed at 6 am on February 25. So what happened to the time between Midnight on Tueday and 6am on Thursday? 30 hours got condensed into a single 12 hour flight. Bruce, the scientist of the family, does not approve.

The plane rides were fun. We got food, and watched movies, and our bums got numb, and we got 4 hours of sleep. From Korea we flew to Beijing, China, and arrived on Thursday at 12 noon. Representatives from our school were there to meet us, and they fed us KFC in the airport. We then flew with them on our 4th flight from Beijing to our school in Weihai, which we just learned means, "strong (wei) ocean (hai)."

It was dark and cold, and we were tired. The six principals of the school treated us to a special dinner to welcome us. Shrimp, with their heads and eyes and everything; cow stomach strips with vinegar; vegetables (my favorite); and something that looked like beef with pineapple. I got excited for the pineapple. When I took a bite, it wasn't pineapple. It was a sweet potato, but it was very tasty! So I took 3 more. Second one- very good. Third one- very good. Fourth one- not a sweet potato. As I chewed it in my mouth, I determined that it was a golf ball sized piece of ginger. No, it did not taste like a gingerbread cookie. Imagine eating a lettuce leaf, and while you're chewing squirt 10 or 12 packets of Taco Bell hot sauce in your mouth, and rub onions in your eyes. You just ate ginger. But generally, the food was good. They had steamed rolls (instead of baked... weird), and sticky rice. We had to use chop sticks. One of the principals complimented Bruce on how well he used the chop sticks. Katie didn't do it "correctly," but somehow got the food from her plate into her mouth using only the chopsticks.

The principals were very nice, and did many toasts for us (cheers!). We hit our pillows around 9:30 pm, and even though our beds were rock hard (actually wood hard), we slept like babies.