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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.