I was trying to make Philadelphia a separate part, but our short stay there makes it impossible.
We checked out from our hotel at New Jersey at 9 am, before lunch time, we found ourselves at the square where erected the Liberty Bell. Philadelphia is holy city in the sense of revolution, just like Yan’an in China, I saw many school kids were organized in group tour.
Our next destination is the eastern coast, there are still three more cities waiting for us: New York, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. The tour so far was very exciting except there were too much flying, and every flying takes averagely about 3-5 hours, I don’t know how, maybe our flight ticket is too cheap that there was no food on board.
This time I was wise, I went to a local supermarket and bought some cookies and a piece of nice sausage with me, but by the time of waiting at the L.A. airport, I had almost finished everything, even before the flight!
We didn’t visit much of Los Angeles, there was just a 10-minutes bus stop in the center of the city.
Our highlight of the day was in Universal Studios Hollywood, the theme park. For a long time, I didn’t visit such a place, though in Beijing, there are some places for this kind of adventure, anyway I just didn’t visit anyone of them.
Our schedule changed a little bit when we were on the way to Los Angeles, that is we were supposed to go to visit L.A. in the first day, then drive to San Diego on the second day, but as the second day was weekend, and the traffic was hard to predict, so we just made these 2 days plan flipped over.
I am not good at gambling, neither do I play any card or Mahjong Games. Our local guide in Las Vegas gave us a most splendid speech on gambling: At any of the gambling place in Las Vegas, people are just gambling against the Casino, it looked some may win, some more may lose, but in the long run, most likely they all will lose. Why? There are two reasons: firstly, it based on the theory of Probability in the most precisely mathematical research; and secondly, the so-called Human Weaknesses push people to make wrong decisions, in winning they come to be more and more cautious, but in losing, they will do just the reverse, so in the end people will lose the game definitely somewhere, somehow.
He also taught some tactics on how to play Black Jack, such as when you are winning, keep the profit about 3/4 and keep playing with just 1/4, this even guaranty you will win at last, but at least you can play a little longer.
“So… how about you? You should be very good at it.” one of us asked him.
“If I am that good, I wouldn’t be here as your guide”, that was his answer.
San Francisco was our second stop. The flight lasted about 5 hours long. There was no free food on board, but the drinks was free, the video on the plane showed us how to cook crab and sea food, my mouth was watering…
There is no direct flight from Beijing to Hawaii, we had to transfer at Narita airport in Tokyo. I prefer such a transfer during the long flight.
The total flight lasts about 9 hours, but plus the change between the time zones, by the time we touched the land at Hawaii, we found ourselves to be several hours ahead of the time when we flew from Beijing, that is, when we boarded the plane at Beijing the time was like 11:00 am of 26th of March, but when arrived in Hawaii, the time was still 07:00 am in the same day, but it made me feel the long flight seems to be unreal.
I am now on a 2-weeks trip in the U.S., coming back with more photos.
I will go to Honolulu, San Francisco, Las Vegas, San Diego, New York, Philadelphia and Washington DC, pretty busy for the next 2 weeks.
Right now I just past over Honolulu, the clouds and sky impressed me a lot.
Ok, finally Google is gone from mainland China this morning. I am waiting to see what is going to happen to Gmail, Google Maps, etc. Hope it will not get the same luck as Facebook and Twitter.
Fortunately before I get used to the Google Dot Cn searching, the service now is finished today.
Good Luck !
This page offers a summary of Google service accessibility from within mainland China.
Suppose there is a big cornfield, and you are asked to pick up the biggest golden ear of wheat, and the condition is that there is only one to pick, and you can only go ahead without return, what you will do?
