Hong Kong day 2

Our second day in Hong Kong, we spent the morning visiting the Big Buddha. We had to take the subway to a place where we caught the bus to go up to it. The bus drive was about 40 minutes, and went through some very pretty mountainous-ish areas.

When we got there, it was very impressive.

We had to climb up a whole bunch of stairs to get to it.

A lot of people around us were praying, so I was careful to be respectful. It made me happy that religion inspires such devotion, and that people are willing to spend so much time and money to make monuments like this for their beliefs.

We went down the stairs again and walked around the monastery there.

And then took the bus and the subway back to our hotel. All in all, this little outing was probably my favorite thing I did in Hong Kong.

After this we just got our stuff together to take the ferry to the mainland. This bit was somewhat traumatic for me (AKA this is where the rant starts). I had been assigned to a school with 6 other girls. I had several of these girls at training, then flew over with them and spent all my time in Hong Kong hanging out with them. I felt really comfortable with the group and was excited to be teaching with them. However, right before we left for the mainland, our head teacher called us together and explained that the school had not gotten as many students as it had been planning, so three of us had to switch to other schools. She wanted to switch me and Camila to the same school, since we had been good friends, but Camila was adamant about staying. I ended up being switched with a girl I didn't get along with as well.

As you may imagine, I was not particularly happy about this. I didn't know the girls in my new school, and I have had less than wonderful experiences with roommates before. I was also jet-lagged, hungry, and very far away from home. So, I sort of burst into tears, had to be comforted by three different people, and switched schools a second time. All this was happening while we were gathering together and going through customs and crossing over to the mainland and driving to our apartments in Zhongshan.

I wasn't even quite done switching. My new group had 15 girls and 4 apartments. I was assigned to one apartment and sort of tried to start figuring out who my roommates were, but then someone wanted to switch so they could be with their friends, so I volunteered to switch so they could be happy. My apartment itself turned out to be lovely (more on that later), but I wasn't so sure about my roommates. They didn't seem to talk very much.

I was feeling pretty sad and lonely until all of a sudden my room-roommate looked over at my stuff and said, "Wait, you're reading the Book of Mormon in Japanese too?"

And it turned out that:

We have the same umbrella

She's also learning Japanese

She has the same favorite Korean Drama as me

She wants to transfer to BYU next fall to be a Linguistics major doing Asian languages

Her boyfriend is in the same mission as a very good friend of mine

Her name is Rachel (So it must be fate. This is my third roommate named Rachel in three years)

And then I felt much better. It turns out that God knows what he is doing. I should probably stop doubting that.