Hong Kong Stopover

I'm sitting at gate 48 in Hong Kong waiting to board the plane to Ho Chi Minh City. I just got off a 15-hour flight from Chicago to Hong Kong. Thought it was funny that shortly after takeoff the captain comes on the intercom to tell us that it looks like we are going to be 5 minutes late arriving in Hong Kong. It seems that the flight scheduled for 14 hours and 58 minutes will actually take 15 hours and 3 minutes. He does not seem confident that we will be able to make up that five minutes over the next 15 hours. Turns out that we only made up two minutes and arrived three minutes after the scheduled arrival time. That's crazy. So what do you do on a 15-hour flight? I read a book about the history of the Mekong Delta. I read parts of another book titled Vietnam Today. I watched Night at the Museum for the second time and I watched Will Ferrell in Stranger than Fiction. I actually thought that was a fairly decent movie. Not great, but definitely not your typical Ferrell goofball comedy where I feel compelled to avert my eyes about half the time.

It's 7 PM Sunday here but 5 AM on my internal clock. I need to stay awake the rest of the way to HCMC so that I can sleep at the normal time in Vietnam. I also just had a very pleasant conversation with some Vietnamese passengers who were in Hong Kong today to run the Hong Kong Marathon. I was wearing my Grandma's Marathon shirt so they struck up a conversation with me thinking that I ran the marathon this morning as well. Alas, I believe my distance running days are over ... somewhat embarrassing considering that all four of these people were at least 10 years older than I.