It's not that I've never been to a new country before, it's that I've never seen one like it. Before the trip, my mother had told me about this place, how the buildings reached so high into the sky that planes could barely fly over them. I thought he was exaggerating, as parents sometimes do when they want to instill a sense of wonder and magic into an otherwise boring and monotonous event for the sake of their children. He had been compliant then, but after a sixteen-hour flight during which she slept the entire time while I endured five re-runs of the movie S Club Seven on the AeroDisney channel, I couldn't have cared. less had promised me that wandering hordes of pink, diamond-encrusted dinosaurs roamed this strange new land. When we had passed the Himalayas as the sun rose in the sky in its freezing weather, I was impressed. After memorizing all the British Airways commercials, I was ready to kill someone in a new and creative way. So, when the plane touched down, I struggled to regain enthusiasm for the new world around me. At least until we left the old airport, a small, cramped box that looked like an abandoned hospital, with cracked, earth-stained tile walls and a vague smell of old cables. For an adult, I can imagine what it must have looked like. That giant city of crystal and metal creeping over the horizon, a looming, almost mocking tribute to Eastern capitalism, daring the West to surpass them in the way they had already proven themselves superior to their rival. For every clunky, clunky concrete and metal building in London, Hong Kong had five made of even finer metal and glass. But what... middle of paper...find any English channel that wasn't the Chinese Discovery Channel, because even though I'd never had a problem with the Discovery Channel before, I quickly developed one here after, after my fifth viewing of 'Raising the Mamoth,' I realized there was simply no discovery to be made other than it being a few hundred feet tall, woolly, and covered in ice. When morning came I found myself in a dangerous combination: hungry and bored. Any of you who have children know that situations like this often never end well. So when my mother decided it would be a great idea to drag my bored, angry, hungry nine-year-old butt to a work breakfast with her co-workers, I have to wonder if she had some nefarious, convoluted plot to leave. the company in the most arcane way possible: through the sheer power of embarrassment.