Month: August 2006

yaaawn

I’m dragging and my eyes are fuzzy but I need to stay up to have any hope of unlagging, so I’ll blog a bit more.

I arrived at HKG more or less on time, although my luggage did not. The immigration queue was good-sized but moving pretty quickly. I saw Jessalyn and Garrett, the other two WVU exchangers this semester, in the line across from mine and we exchanged hellos. However, my vow to meet them in a few minutes was not kept since I was dealing with the lost luggage process.

The stamp indicating that I’ve entered under a student visa is massive and would make more sense if used to deface the visa instead of thrown across the next page.

Mints at immigration were exceedingly good. I must take a handful next time.

In the arrivals area I was met by some Lingnaners whose names are already forgotten in the haze. A minibus took me, with the other CX 831 students, to campus. We were given a temporary, laminated, non-photo, barcoded student ID. RAs back home might appreciate that the desks are staffed by the university’s security force and that scanning is a self-service affair, with a scanning gun pointed out across the front desk.

The mattresses are concretely harder than I’m used to. The concession made for my height—a tiny little extension piece of mattress—is pretty funny looking, but with the pillow partly on it I fit just fine on the bed, so I can’t complain.

Got a welcome bag with chocolate chip cookies (Dannon-brand ChipsAhoy clone), M&Ms, and a 430ml (?) bottle of “Watson’s Water.”

The room is not as small as people have been trying to convince me, but I am sure it will feel much smaller when my roommate arrives. I think the greatest shortcoming is a near-total lack of space to hang clothes.

Lingnan’s campus is small but not that small. I was able to make sense of it, more or less, today. Garrett was also lagged and up quite early, so I exchanged an ethernet cord with him in exchange for a borrowed shirt and drop of toothpaste. We registered, got our “Liberal Arts Education / engage the world” totes full of orientation materials (including copies of things we were to have brought), and ate a decent but non-special breakfast in the Canteen.

It seems to be impossible to find cold drinking water in Hong Kong restaurants (sample size of 2). The local lemon iced tea is an almost-Southern substitute.

After breakfast we were marched off to a day full of “briefings” by the OMIP (Ofc. of Mainland and Int’l Prog.), ITSC (Info. Tech. Blah Blah), Registry (picture of my unshaven, unshowered face for my student ID), and so on. We also had a brief campus tour taking us to the shopping center at Fu Tai just off campus. Fu Tai is a public housing complex with a population of 20,300 (the closest New Town, Tuen Mun, boasts a population of around 500,000 total). On the bottom couple floors of one of the buildings, a bus terminus shares space with the shopping center, which includes a Park-n-Shop grocery, a Circle K convenience store, and a McDonalds (natch). We had a dim sum lunch there (a restaurant, not McD’s), comprising the conventional (spring rolls, broccoli), the sublime (shrimp dumplings), and the weird (chicken feet. yes, tried them. not impressed.). The tyranny of hot tea continued, which isn’t that surprising since the locals use the Cantonese phrase “drink tea” to mean going for dim sum.

On my way out I bought a US->Britplug adapter for just 10 HKD, thanks to which the laptop is charged and I can type all this junk. A mixed blessing. When I got change I thought I might have been cheated—I’d seen the shopkeeper try (and fail thanks to a quick-eyed exchanger) to change the price of an Ethernet cord from 30 to 50 a moment before—but he’d just given me a couple different types of HK$20 bills. Three different commercial banks issue equally valid versions of the banknotes here.

At lunch I was informed that my luggage would be delivered by 2 p.m. When I got out of orientation around 4:30 I found that was an optimistic prediction, but (just to make a fool of me) a couple minutes after calling to check the courier showed up in the lobby. It’s so good to see my toothpaste, towel, and such again, to say nothing of clothes.

I am told that the proper form of my mailing address is as follows:

Student Hostel B, Room 306A
Lingnan University
Tuen Mun, N.T.
HONG KONG

You know what to do.

I will get to taking and uploading pictures one day, but I don’t think I can stare at a screen any more tonight. I’m going to go take a desperately-needed shower (in the electronic combination lock–protected lavatory… to keep the girls out, I guess?) and then ??. Good morning, America.

Running on Battery

Well, it’s about 5:30 in the morning and I’m awake, which isn’t that bad… The travel doc’s prescribed Ambien knocked me out hard from about midnight til now, so I’m feeling a bit rested. My computer is running on (44%) battery—I should be able to buy a plug adapter today though. As you can see, the Ethernet Just Worked.â„¢

The trip follows (I might make these their own posts and back-date them later, but it’s really early):

21 Aug. 2006, about 10 a.m. EDT
As the reality of a 10-month break from my current reality… well, it doesn’t so much set it as it overwhelms me. Maybe it was low blood sugar (hadn’t eaten) or the morning chill, but I was shivering as I got out of Sarah’s car at the airport. I’m airside in PIT waiting by gate D78 for my puddle-jumped to JFK, having pretty much exhausted the usefulness of PIT’s free airport-wide wi-fi. [obviously not thinking of the usefulness of blogging directly and bypassing the notebook] Sarah was kind enough to give me the very early morning ride from Morgantown and good conversation, and Dianna was a gracious hostess even at 6 a.m. It was good to see everyone I caught up with [and steal a convocation t-shirt and ice cream and get my hair cut]. This year’s staff in dad/stal looks fun; part of me wishes I were staying behind in carpeted, air-con luxury, but it’s too late for that now.

2:06 p.m.
JFK (from what I’ve seen) is completely unimpressive, right down to denying me a good photo of my Cathay Pacific ride and forcing me down the Longest, Most Convoluted, Jetway, EVAR. JFK is split into many small terminals and once you get past security (again, in each one) Terminal 7 is not that exciting: 12 gates, three food places. On the plus side, McDonald’s was serving soft-serve vanilla cones of Dublin-like proportions for little money.

There sure isn’t much English in this boarding lounge.

To be fair, the inbound view from the Canadair was pretty cool.

2 a.m. EDT, over northern Siberia:
Eating congee over northern Sibera, with six hours left out of sixteen, and it’s so good. Seat 30D was a bulkhead/aisle/exit seat in the first row of economy, so my feet got to ride business class behind the curtain. For a 16 hour flight it was pretty survivable, but more on that later… I’m off to borrow something. The rest of the flight, my landing, and first impressions of Lingnan, next post.

outtie

I’ll be leaving about 6 o’clock tomorrow morning for Pittsburgh. It’s been really good to catch up with everyone I ran across in Morgantown, and my ex-co-workers are wonderful people for putting up with me for another two days. I’ll update next from the other side (unless I get really bored near free wi-fi in PIT or JFK).

In an exciting update, the TSA has decided to allow solid deodorant in carry-on luggage. This is a good thing for everyone in Economy class everywhere.

Please keep in touch. I’ll miss you.

held hostel

It seems WVU has finally gotten around to billing me for my room (per the exchange agreement). I’m living in an exclusive international section of Arnold Hall (which happens to be thousands of miles from Prospect St.) in a double room for $1,750 per semester.

The Lingnan hostel fee for 2005-06 averaged a bit under HK$4,400 = US$565.76.

I’m getting the short end of the exchange here…

Liquids On A Plane!

Well, this morning I was greeted by the heartwarming news that the previous Aging Empire broke up a terror plot involving liquids. Not that that hasn’t been tried before. Now, it’s a wonderful thing (and I’m typing that phrase in an atypically sincere way) and a fabulous victory for British law enforcement.

What isn’t a victory is the hysterical overreaction both in the UK and here at home (which I desperately hope will be softened by the time of my trans-Pacific flight). Both countries have banned liquids, gels, creams, pastes, and such from carry-on luggage, but the UK has gone a giant leap farther and temporarily banned all carrying-on except for a select set of items carried in a clear plastic bag.

This is starting to sound like junior high school already, if you grew up in the right places—suburban Charleston, for instance. But the British top the school systems: you can’t even carry a book (textbook or Sudoku, equally ungood) or newspaper aboard to provide some entertainment, as you wonder how that baggage handler is enjoying his new laptop—which the airline refuses liability for, and which you were forced to check because it’s not on The List. And I hope you don’t mind the e. coli-laced “potable” water you’ll be getting when the flight attendants have handed out the last of the 3 bottles of water provided by catering.

For my selfish purposes, I can only hope that the electronics ban is not extended to the States before I get out–I don’t know how comfortable I am with checking my laptop. It got Fedexed to me from China, maybe I’ll just Fedex it back. I’m sure that the assorted lawyer- and corporate-types who would be breaking professional codes by doing that aren’t so comfortable either. The idea is not that smart either—we were making sparks long before anyone even thought about flying without flapping his wings, and planes are not exactly short of electrical equipment for budding pyros too lazy to work on their deadly flint-knapping skillz.

Most of all I pity the thankless soul meeting me coming off a sixteen hour non-stop without toothpaste and clean water (the ban will probably be in effect at least that long).

I hope some of the hysteria calms down over the next two weeks. Or at least over my lifetime–cattle class is a pain, but traveling is a joy. But if you ratchet up the pain enough (ask Ryanair for tips, they’re getting almost good enough) it just isn’t worth it anymore. Proper detection of any type of explosive in a few bottles of toiletries or drinks should not be the unsolvable problem that breaks the back of commercial air travel. We’re smarter animals than that.

Solution: put luggage through a trial by fire! If it doesn’t explode, it’s a witch—and we’re forced to dispose of it in a controlled detonation. Freedom isn’t free, people.

countdown’s on

As my ex-co-workers get started with RA training back in Morgantown, their two weeks of purgatory will coincide with my two weeks left stateside: I leave from PIT at 10:30 on the first Monday of school. With any luck I’ll be able to find a way to actually get to the airport: it’s my father’s first day of class in Montgomery, too, and it would be quite a drive to make it to PIT by 8:30 from here anyway.

I have e-mailed my roommate and not gotten anything back… hope he can understand me at least a little, it’ll make things run smoother.

Finally took my tuberculosis test (well, the first part: I still need to get it read on Friday) at the Health Dept. here today, which has started charging. I guess they can’t be expected to do everything for free, but it would have been nice if $10 had bought a bandage instead of a piece of (unwrapped) gauze off the counter.

I’ve started thinking about communications: I’ll need to try to sweet-talk Sprint into cancelling my service without charging me $150. For Hong Kong, I’ve done a little research and it looks like the CSL Prepaid SIM card will work fine, as long as I can find a tolerably-priced unlocked phone. I might even be able to get reasonable (around five US cents/minute) international rates, which would be nice.

Meanwhile, law applications have continued to distract me from the more important goal of finishing a paper for my Summer Guided Reading course in Information Ethics. To my frustration, many of the schools require a “certification letter” to be sent by mail. But instead of writing about this, I think I need to go write ten pages or so about Information Ethics. And upgrade the blogging software… NO. Information Ethics. Capitalized Words. Yes.