China

We landed and the first thing i did was I grabbed a newspaper with OBAMA on the cover!!!! YAYAYAY Go OBAMA. It was so much fun and we got MSNBC feed magically on the ship. I helped organize an elections day watch party in the Union and I was running around getting results for 7 hours, but it was all worth it! People were sitting in the Union crying and cheering as Obama came on for his speech. It was awesome and the few republicans that were there watching cleared out then. It was kinda funny. I was just so happy that day, I can't get over it!

China was 100% overwhelming. I think my exhaustion from the past 6 weeks caught up with me in China. We have been in a new country every week for the past 6 weeks I think and we haven't had a break from all the running so i was so tired! I don't want to make like what I saw was nothing, because the Great Wall was amazing and the Temple of Heaven, the Forbidden City, and the Summer palace (which was my favorite i cannot describe how beautiful the gardens are) were all amazing places. But, I left the Temple of Heaven and the Forbidden city and I didn't feel anything about them. I can appreciate them but i got no enjoyment from being there. beijing right now is freezing! And my experience as a whole was frustrating there-- in a good way though cause everyone needs to be shaken when they are traveling at least once! No one speaks english so communicating is hard, especially with cabs, the majority of which never understood us or would take us back to our hotel in the middle of an enormous university- Tsinghua University. The food was pretty bad actually as well, it was bland and very fatty, had some great rice though! The people are also very vulgar, is guess is all i can say, they push and shove and don't really care that you are standing there and they are all spitting and coughing up mucus right and left, probably because the air is so dirty. One girl had a really bad asthma attack because the air was so dirty. Our final day there was so smoggy that you could hardly see 100 feet away! We saw the olympic stadiums as well, which was fun and cool to be there. There is this crazy market as well- the silk street markets which was absolutely insane, we found fake uggs and any designer, even jeans there! It was just a lot of fun being in the crazyness-- everyone is calling and grabbing you- literally - saying "lady lady what you looking for i give you good price." over and over, and this wasn't just in the china ones, in every market we have been to it was the same thing, but i loved it. It was fun going through the markets and seeing how things differed or stayed the same from country to country!

I loved Shanghai and Hong Kong much more so than Beijing- although a friend of ours was killed in Hong Kong so it was a huge shock, something we are still dealing with. Its hard to believe that this would happen because you hear about it but you never believe it will happen. Thinking about what his family is going through makes me sick and makes us all realize how careful we need to be because we are traveling in foreign places. He has a twin back home and I just keep thinking about what it would be like to go through that if I lost any of my 3 sisters. I don't know how I would get through it. I just hope for the best for his family.

Vietnam

Vietnam was so much fun and it was great seeing mom and dad. I don't even know where to begin. Mom was crying while she stood outside the boat waiting to get on and don't worry she was wearing a witch hat for halloween. The first day was really intense because we toured ho chi minh city, which everyone calls Saigon. We went the Reunification Palace and the War museum. there is this insane market there as well, the Benton Market, and you can find anything imaginable there including every copied thing ever! We got 10 dollar "north face" hiking bags. Then we went to Cambodia and I love Cambodia. Our first stop was Phnom Penh and our day there was also very intense. We started with S21 prison. For those of you who don't know what that is, it was one of the prisons the Khmer Rouge used to torture prisoners before they were taken to the killing fields. This prison was like what the camps were in the holocaust. It was so erie going through them and I think what got me the most was this one photo there. The soldiers took before and after pictures of all their victims and as you walk through the prison you see them all and i saw this one photo of a man smiling. It was the only photo where someone was smiling and It just really got me. No one made it out of the prison alive, and even as he was facing so much, he still looked at peace. After that we tried to make it to the killing fields, but traffic in cambodia was nuts. Bicycles, cars, busses, and carts are everywhere and the streets are small and then on top of all that we ran into a protest so we turned around and went to the royal palace instead. The palace was so gorgeous i still can't believe it. The pictures don't seem real!! Then we made it to the killing fields and it was so sad. Shredded clothing and teeth are still visible and a monument full of uncovered skulls stands as a reminder of the atrocities that took place there.

From there we flew to Siem Riep where Angkor Wat is. Flying in is so beautiful because you look down and see all the green rice fields. Then driving through is also awesome, there are homes that stick up in the rice fields and the sun reflecting off the water is picturesque. We saw so many temples in Angkor wat, and I don't bore you with the details, but they were all awesome. Instead of The Pagoda ones in Vietnam and Phnom Penh, these were ancient temples made out of stone. The most amazing one by far was Angkor Wat which i got to see on three separate occasions. Others were Angkor Thom, Bayon, and more but i would have to look up their names. It was such a great trip and we all had so much fun being together, although we were so exhausted after it all. Our last day together we spent wandering around Saigon shopping and having great food. You really can't have a bad meal there because both vietnamese and french foods are everywhere. The best drink is vietnamese iced coffee--try it you will love it!

Can’t believe what just happened! I have been running around coordinating results in the union for seven hours and it has finally happened! Barack wins!!!!!!!!!! It was great being on the ship and everyone was watching from the Union because somehow we got MSNBC feed!!!