311201, 2044hr, florida time.

i'm at fort lauderdale right now, about 1 hour from miami - though when i called home this morning, i told my parents i was already at miami. haha.

the kennedy space center was quite interesting. some of my friends have come to florida before, and they unanimously agreed that the kennedy space center was the best part of it all, so i had my hopes all quite high. hmm. well. it's quite good, i guess, but it still didn't match up to my expectations. oops.

we started from the visitor's center where i picked up the japanese version of the map and had plenty of fun reading the katakana terms and trying to guess what they meant - pet-to ken-ne-ru? pet kennel! a-do-ben-chu? adventure! ba-bi ka-to? baby cart [baby stroller]! hahaha...it was fun. heh.

from the visitor's center, we took a bus shuttle that brought us to two other parts of the kennedy space center - firstly a viewing tower to look at launching pad 39 and the apollo-saturn V center. i liked the apollo-saturn V center, found out a lot of new stuff and clarified others. there was apollo 1, the first attempt to fly man to the moon, but ended in tragedy, when the 3 astronauts were all killed in a flash fire during a pre-launch test. there were 17 apollo misions altogether, putting 12 men on the moon. my goodness, it just seems so amazing, to hear the astronauts speak so nonchalantly of their fearless explorations. we also watched a film about the final minutes of apollo 11 that carried neil armstrong to the moon. the details of last minute communication problems, technical discrepancies and program failures. goodness. at the end of the film, neil armstrong spoke of his experiences, and how nothing can be "impossible". it's very inspiring.

hmm. other than that, i don't remember what else that's so good about the kennedy space center. i guess i'm not really interested in the technical or historical information about man's space exploration adventures. and i know more about astronomy than the usual visitor probably, so the exhibitions, designed for possibly kids and the layman, didn't really give me any intellectual stimulation. i guess the interesting part of this whole visit was the kind of spirit and courage exuded in all the space exploration missions. to go out there, into the unknown. wow. like neil armstrong says, how then can anything be impossible? if man could fly to the moon. aaahh. so nice.

anyhow, fort lauderdale is kinda boring, cos it's new year's eve and almost every other tourist attraction is closed. plus, it's been rainy the whole day, so we couldn't even go the beach. lucky we decided to cancel our camping trip though. the original plan was to go camping over new year's eve, so we could make a peaceful passover into the year 2002. but we realised the weather was gonna be bad, so we're gonna postponed it to when we get to key west. hopefully the weather will be more cooperative then.

we had a nice dinner at chili's though, i had a steak, which turned out to be disgusting - i think i've gotten to used to my vegetarian diet, i felt a little queasy. we bought some fruity wine though, we're gonna play truth or dare later, have some fun tonight. when harry met sally is on tv right now, i have to go watch. it's hilarious.