Augie in China: One last stop

Augustana senior Kyle Nelson and his teammates took a summer trip to China. He will be blogging regularly on D3hoops.com about the team’s journey.

Augustana players and coaches on the Great Wall

Our last day overseas. The most amazing trip of our lives is finally coming to a close. To close out the trip we had a forced layover in Japan, due to having a connecting flight to Chicago the next day. That allowed us a little bit of time for some sightseeing. We traveled into downtown Tokyo and made our first stop at Tokyo Tower. This is the largest free standing steel structure in the world. It had an observation deck to go up in. Immediately we could see why Tokyo was the most populated city in the world with about 37 million people. It was huge! The city stretched beyond what we could see from the tower and it was truly an impressive sight.
 
Next stop on the Tokyo-in-a-day tour was the Imperial Palace, located in the center of the city. This Palace is where the Emperor and his family resided. The current Emperor is part of a family that has been in the Imperial Palace for 125 generations. That is an incredible amount of time. Currently, however, the Emperor of Japan serves no purpose other than being a figure-head for the country. All political power has been removed from that position and resides elsewhere within the political system. The Palace was closed on this particular afternoon so we were not able to go inside, but we got a view of part of it from across the moat that surrounded the compound.
 
We made a brief stop at a Buddhist Temple (Asakusa) before heading to our meal. This meal was easily the best of the trip. Each table had its own little grill on it and there was a buffet of at least fifteen different kinds of raw meats that you could choose yourself and cook yourself. I’m pretty sure that everyone ate way more than they could handle, but it was good none the less.
 
At dinner, we had a special guest waiting for us. His name was Phil Hoffman and he was the Minister-Counselor of Public Affairs for the United States Embassy in Tokyo. He also happened to be an Augie grad (1974) and an ex-student for Dr. Moline. Phil spent about half an hour talking to the group about what he did overseas and how his Augie education has really helped him in his job that has taken him from Greece to India to Nepal and to Japan among other places. He was really an impressive and well-spoken man and his stories were truly one-of-a-kind because no where else could you experience what he had gone through.
 
Our flight to Chicago leaves in and hour and a half. One more blog coming when we land back home!
 
Kyle Nelson