It has been a few days! We are back in the Netherlands, arrived Saturday at 11 AM in Bremen/Germany, and then travelled back home by car, another 2 hours.
Our last day in China was fun. I had packed the suitcase on Thursday night already, so we didn't have much to do the next morning. Showering, finishing packing, having breakfast, and then we went down to the lobby of the hotel. I paid our bill, and the suitcase was stored with the hotel concierge. Then we went to the metro, bought a few croissants, and hopped on the metro for Window of the World, a theme park with a lot of buildings and landmarks from all over the world. It's not the typical tourist attraction for western tourists, but it was fun nevertheless. As it was a Chinese holiday, it was really busy at the park. We took the monorail first to have a look how big the park was and to see everything from above. What I didn't like about the park was that every activity within the park had to be paid for separately. The monorail for example was 20 RMB. We walked through the park, looked at the landmarks, saw a show of Thai dancing, ate our croissants, took a ride in a rollercoaster, saw the ice skating and skiing hall (really strange when the outdoor temperature is 30° Celcius). We ate a very nice kind of Burmese fried pancake, and spent our time until 3 PM at the park. Then we returned to the hotel, changed our clothes, had a drink in the lobby bar, and waited for the transfer van to arrive (at 5 PM). The van was exactly on time, it was the same kind of minivan again. We drove in the Shekou direction, to the car park where all minivans come together. There where not many people heading for the Hong Kong airport at that time, only three Chinese men extra. So we went with the minivan to the border, where we could stay in the car, everything regarding the border controls was handled by the driver! What a luxury. It took about 2 hours in total from the hotel to the Hong Kong Airport. We went in to the airport and had to wait until 8 PM (three hours before departure) before we could check in. I tried to change our tickets so that we could leave the plane in Amsterdam (we had to wait about 5 hours in Amsterdam before we could fly to Bremen, our final destination on our ticket), but that wasn't allowed, sadly.
In Hong Kong airport we had free internet, so Shen was playing at the plane simulators, and I was chatting with a colleague in the Netherlands and sending a mail home.
We then went with the metro to our gate, and boarded the airplane. We took off at around 11.10 PM, had a snack (Shen was already sleeping, of course, it was late), and then I tried to sleep. And it worked! I miraculously slept until 6.30 AM, felled refreshed, and read a book until we descended to Amsterdam airport. Everything went well, and we arrived at 4.30 AM (local time) in Amsterdam. We had to wait until 9.30 before we could board the next plane, but we managed to survive. The weather was great, so very nice views from the plane that took us in an hour to Bremen. Rudy, Mean and my father where standing on the roof of the airport, they saw us landing, and within 10 minutes we were in the airport hall and drove home. I'll send some photos to the blog separately.
