Visiting Dallas has been like a history lesson going all the way back to the 1960s when Kennedy was president, up to George W. Bush’s dismal presidency that ended just years ago. We visited the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum this morning and then the Sixth Floor Museum, the museum dedicated to the life, assassination, and legacy of John F. Kennedy. The museum is actually built on the same site and on the same floor where the assassin Lee Harvey Oswald shot Kennedy multiple times as his motorcade drove through Dealey Plaza in downtown Dallas.

The whole exhibit was put together so well, with lots of details of the Kennedys’ lives and an almost minute by minute account of what happened on the day of the assassination. I’ve developed an increased sensitivity to hearing about deaths, especially premature and tragic ones, and my eyes overflowed with tears when I read the description of Jackie Kennedy’s reaction to leaving Dallas after her husband’s death was pronounced. The new President Johnson and the Secret Service advised her to go back to D.C. immediately, but she refused, saying she would not leave Dallas without her husband’s body. Johnson consented and had Jackie and the president’s body in a coffin aboard Air Force One. The entire flight, Jackie sat in the back of the plane with the coffin next to her.

Stories like this always get me, hearing people’s experiences of great tragedy and loss and how they coped in a life without the ones they loved. It would certainly be worse to experience loss with the public eye staring down at you every single day and evaluating your life and every facial expression.

It’s been exactly two weeks from the wedding day, and I’m still so exhausted. Every sleep I have has been such a deep sleep, and when my alarm goes off at 6:20am for the gym, I feel cranky and just want to keep hitting snooze. I resisted the urge to sleep in three times this week, so I think I’m doing fairly well.

We haven’t had a proper weekend to just rest and do nothing since Chris’s parents have been in town since our first weekend back, and this weekend, we are Dallas-bound since Chris wanted to avoid the cold of the east coast. Getting on a plane seems so exhausting now, but I will be happy when we are eating Texas barbeque soon enough. I really just want to rest, vegetate, and do nothing for just a couple of days.

We were surprisingly very productive and efficient on our first day in the LA area, so we decided to use Tuesday to enjoy the day for ourselves and do what probably no one does during their wedding week travel: visit two presidential libraries in a single day. We visited the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, and the Reagan Library, which was huge and sprawling and even included an Air Force One, in Simi Valley. Both were grand and beautiful in their own ways, but both also managed to gloss over all the negative aspects of both presidencies, such as Nixon’s Watergate scandal and ultimate resignation from the presidency, and Reagan’s previous wife and first daughter, and how he used to be a Democrat in his life pre-presidency. Revisionist history never really works, especially when smart Americans rarely forget what really happened in the past.

I woke up at 4:15 this morning to catch a 6am flight to Atlanta. I knew it was too early when the little food stands were still not open when I got past security and to my gate. When I arrived at 8:30am, I felt exhausted and like I hadn’t even slept the night. I was lucky to get early check in at my hotel and napped for half an hour before getting back to work before my meetings began in the afternoon.

I can feel myself getting older. I don’t always feel it or think I look it, but when I wake up at 4am these past two Mondays to get on a work flight, I feel miserable afterwards. Even now as I type this, I feel worn. My colleagues and I had an early dinner and got back to our hotel at 8pm, and I went straight back to my computer to get all these things done that I had no time to get done during the day. And two more packed and full days await me. I want to take one long nap.

I dreaded taking this train, and now that I have taken it, it absolutely was not fun at all. It’s a spoiled point of view, but after having taken amazing trains in Japan, Switzerland, and Germany, it’s really hard to take an Amtrak train and think, “wow, this is an awesome experience!” The wi-fi kept coming in and out, the ride was really bumpy, and the seats were sub par. Granted, it only took one hour and 20 minutes to get back to Penn Station, but I could feel myself getting nauseated while trying to get some work done. I just want to get home. I just want to get home. I kept thinking this in my mind.

I talked to my dad about the whole experience, and he said to me that at least I got to stay at a nice hotel in downtown and expense some decent meals. The truth is that while work travel may seem glamorous to those who don’t do it often or at all, at the end of the day, sometimes it’s really nice and comforting just to eat a meal in your own home, made by yourself or a family member, and just sit and relax and not be in some foreign transient environment. It can be a really lonely and alienating experience, especially after you got stranded in an airport due to wind storms and everyone around you is an upset or angry stranger.

After a failed attempt to do a day trip to Guangzhou and deciding to pass on a Macau day trip this time around, we spent our last full day in Hong Kong at Disneyland. The city makes it so easy for you to get there on your own, with an incredibly affordable train trip to get there, its own separate train that even has windows in the shape of Mickey Mouse heads, and clearly marked signs denoted with Mickey heads so that you know exactly where you are going and how to get there. My two favorite rides, Space Mountain and It’s a Small World were there, and much to Chris’s disgust and embarrassment, I made him go on It’s a Small World with me (we were lucky and got to ride Space Mountain twice, along with Grizzly Mountain, a combination of Thunder Mountain the U.S. and another ride I can’t remember). I don’t care what anyone else says about the Small World ride and how “kiddy” it may be. It was my favorite Disneyland ride when I first went to Disneyland Anaheim when I was five, and it will continue to be one of my top two favorite Disney rides. I love that it teaches young children about the world outside of what they know, other cultures, other languages, and other traditions. And I love the cute depictions of people dancing, singing, and living life in their different daily environments. And it’s just such a happy ride. You can’t help but get the song stuck in your head at the end, or at least the tune.

A major difference between this theme park and the Anaheim and Orlando locations I’ve been to, other than the variety of food (who would have ever thought I could get salted egg, bok choy, cha siu, soy sauce chicken over rice with a side of curried fish balls and turnip at a Disneyland?!) and the smaller size (there are rides that are very mindfully overlapping each other), was the difference in the haunted mansion ride. When I was five and sat on this ride, I was immediately spooked that we were all seated in what appeared to be a coffin seat. At the end, I was half scared and half laughing at the image of the fake ghost that appears in the mirrors between me and my ride partner. As soon as we got seated today, I knew the ghost image would not happen; the seats were not high enough for an image to appear that would sit taller than me, and the seat itself was not the coffin shaped seat I remember vividly from Anaheim and Orlando. And lo and behold, it was exactly as I suspected; the end had no ghost appear with us in our seat, no mirrors at all!

The thought that instantly came to me was that because Chinese people are traditionally so superstitious about death, Hong Kong could not handle it if they were seated in a coffin shaped seat, even if it was just for an amusement park ride. They would think it would be bad luck. The same goes for having a ghost image appear next to them in a mirror, as that is what happens on the haunted house ride back in the U.S. References to departed spirits or the afterlife are very bad in Chinese culture, and this appears to be the rationale for having a more “mystical,” fantasy-based theme in the Hong Kong equivalent of the haunted mansion according to all the online sources we read that compare the differences among the Disneyland theme parks across the world.

I guess even at Disneyland, you can’t have fun with death among the Chinese.