dh

This page has been somewhat short of material lately. It’s my fault: I haven’t gathered much. I’ve been haunting my usual haunts (the bakeries at Siu Hong). As classes go on and I adjust to Lingnan it’s natural that things get less exciting.

Yesterday was one of the most depressing days (in terms of weather) I’ve had the misfortune to experience, anywhere. Gray, gray, gray. I had planned to go out to Sha Tin but that got scrubbed because nobody felt like going outside. We experienced the wrath of a Red Rainstorm Signal–deserving day of rain—not bad enough to force cancellations, but pretty wet just the same.

Last night (yes, Saturday) I did laundry. Washers (even snazzy, modern-seeming front-loaders) here are the last stand of cash: they require six HK$1 coins to operate. Each one of those coins will buy you seven minutes of drying time.

Today we are reaping the benefits of yesterday’s outburst: decent weather. The RH has been in the 70s, but the temperature hit the 70s (Fahr.) too. This is pretty amazing. I’m looking forward to winter. Unfortunately, the lingering clouds over Macau (according to weather services) got me to scrub the trip I’d hoped to take this weekend. The next free, sunny weekend day, I’m there.

A pair of public holidays is coming up in October, and I’m itching to travel (though I’ve still seen embarrassingly little of Hong Kong). I’ll fix the Hong Kong part after Wednesday, when my student Octopus will make me feel less poor as I make the long trek on the MTR into Kowloon and Central.

As for the upcoming long weekends, I’d like to try to hit some of the places that will be out of the way on a potential overland Southeast Asia fling over the winter break. Low-fare airlines are a plus (and rare). It looks like about US$150 tax-in on Cebu Pacific to Manila, so I might be headed there over the [PRC] National Day weekend. Other out-of-way destinations include Taiwan (a possible stopover if I get a CAL flight anywhere interesting), destinations in China (Beijing and Shanghai are on the want list, but Guangzhou is doable on a regular weekend), Japan, Korea (money grows on trees in my imagination), and Indonesia (possible low-fare connections here).