Sweating, exploring, sweating, getting lost, and always more sweating.

So it's hot here.. if you can't tell by the title of this post.  It's foggy OFTEN because of the crazy humidity.  The coolest times of the day are when it rains (which happens once every day or so), but as soon as the random downpours stop, the humidity gets even worse and the sun fries us all once again.  Needless to say, I've been taking quite a few buses and staying indoors as often as possible.  Often times I've broken a sweat before I've even ridden the 17 floors down on the elevator to leave my building.  On school days, our team is drenched before we even get to the MTR station.

And then four of us decided to hike a mountain on Friday when we had the day off of school.  And we proceeded to get lost and wander around for quite awhile.  Before even reaching a halfway point, our shirts were soaked through, sweat was running into our eyes and mouth, and our arms and legs were simply glistening as we chugged our water bottles dry and swatted away the bugs.

Joy, Rachel, and I all sweaty and exhausted in the middle of our hike.  Little did we know just how far we had yet to go.  Team leader Amanda joined us for the hike and took this great picture.

Finally, after two hours of hiking, sweating, bug sweating, water drinking, rest taking, and asking for directions, we made it to The Peak overlooking the city, harbor, and ocean... and the view was totally worth it...

The entire city of Hong Kong on one side...

And the beautiful expanse of the ocean on the other...

Later that night, we met up with the rest of our team.  We grabbed dinner at a delicious Thai restaurant, took the ferry across to Hong Kong Island and back, watched a light show on the city's buildings across the harbor, and toured the Avenue of Stars.

It was a great day off of teaching with a wonderful team!