I'm back.

Home, Thoughs on Airports

I'm home! I mean actual home, not Newport News home. There was no post last night because after I had dinner with my parents, I sacked out at 9 pm and slept for twelve hours. Knowing me, I'm not prepared to say this has any bearing at all on my jet lag.

It must be the most thankless job in the world to run an airport. It must be sort of like being a domestic servant - if you do your job well then nobody notices, but if you screw it up then all of a sudden people are screaming at you. I mean shamelessly, unreservedly screaming at you. Think of how hard it must be to coordinate thousands of flights each day, to make sure all those flights have the support they need to run on schedule, to make sure the hundreds of thousands of people on those flights know where they're supposed to be and when, that they have the right transportation and wheelchair and toddler assistance, to make sure those hundreds of thousands of people are distributed evenly throughout the airport and not stacked all at a few gates, and to make sure on top of all that that nobody does anything illegal or dangerous. No smuggling, no terrorism, no craziness, no importation of hoof and mouth disease, no theft. No pressure!

This is what you start thinking about when you spend more than 48 total hours in a week at airports / on airplanes.

So there were maybe two hundred people crowded around this tiny carousel at National airport yesterday after my last flight, and of course fifty of those people absolutely had to be right at the spot where the bags come out. This meant a lot of suited jerks pushing through each other and nearly clobbering each other in their attempts to manhandle their golf club cases off the carousel. This one huge guy decided he was too important to wait so he shouts "SCUSE ME SCUSE ME SCUSE ME SCUSE ME" and literally shoves his way to the front, towing behind his four year old daughter who, just so you know, was dressed like Snow White. Not that he had seen his bag or anything, he just wanted to be in front. So then one of the guys he'd shoved actually sees his bag and tries to do the same shoving-scuse-me move to get it, but accidentally gives the other guy's tiny little daughter a bump in the process. The other guy gets furious and starts yelling about how he was going to knock the other guy out for daring to touch his little girl ... I just moved well away from that nonsense and waited for the TSA people to rush out with their tasers, but they never came.

Welcome home!

I also wanted to mention, since I'm talking about airports, that if you find yourself in Hong Kong or Beijing airports and you want some gum or toothpaste or something before your twelve hour flight, you should probably get it beforehand. At the airport they don't sell things you might need on airplanes. They definitely have a lot of luxury stores. You can shop for $800 sunglasses or $2000 purses no problem, but if you want a neck pillow or earplugs you're out of luck. Just so you know.

Anyway, now I'm home and well-rested. Glad to see my parents and my sister. I guess tomorrow I'm headed back to work, just like this all never happened.

Halloween!

First: Oh my sweet goodness I am jetlagged. I can't really sleep for more than four hours at a time, but I feel most of the time like I could curl up in a corner and sleep for about four hours.

Today I woke up and realized that Anaïs and I had a Halloween party to go to tonight. I especially wanted to go - if just for a tiny little while - to met her fellow grad students. But this meant we had to get costumes, which meant we had to go shopping.

Let me make this clear: I am usually dead set against buying a costume. My tastes are most certainly not store bought. Still, I wasn't going to carry a Halloween costume all the way through China just for two hours of party afterwards. So anyway, we went shopping.

There are three or four costume shops all within walking distance of Santa Cruz's downtown area, and they are all identical in that they only sell costumes for girls with low self-esteem. There were, practically speaking, no costumes for boys. And all - absolutely all - of the costumes for girls were of the Sexy _____ variety. Sexy Cats. Sexy Nurses. Sexy Cheerleaders. Even - I swear I swear - Sexy Bumble Bees. Where are the creepy tasteless masks? Where are the vampire costumes? (I mean besides the Sexy Vampire costumes.) Clearly we were not shopping in the right places.

So I went with the perennial favorite Sexy Cat (see first photo). Although judging from what people said I'm not sure I really "got" it. Anaïs is more original-minded than I am and made her own costume: Sexy His Holiness The Fourteenth Dalai Lama (see second photo).

The party itself was loud and full of drunk undergraduates so we mainly talked outside. Happy Halloween everybody!

My flight back to DC leaves from San Jose tomorrow morning at 7 am. I imagine this will not help my jet lag situation.

Back in the States.

Here is how I feel: bleahbleahbleahbleahbleah. A twelve-hour flight preceded by a four-hour airport experience will do that, I guess.

Two days ago, I was seriously planning on spending the night at Beijing airport. My argument went like this: I'm going to get back from Hong Kong late at night on Tuesday, and there's no point in paying a bunch of money for a hotel room that I'll only be able to stay in for six hours or so. (I was assuming, here, that any hotel I would want to stay at was at least 30 or 45 minutes away from the airport.) This would've meant 12 hours or so spent in the lobby of Beijing airport. I was thinking that it would be a good idea since after staying up all night on Tuesday I would definitely for sure be able to sleep on my flight all the way back to the States.

Ha.

When I got off the flight from Hong Kong I sort of booked a hotel room at the airport without really realizing what I was doing. So tired. I was so tired I said this to the poor airport hotel reservation lady: "Are there any airports near the hotel?" She got very confused.

I ended up paying around US$60 for a tiny room in the "Beijing Olympic Airportel", which to its credit was clean and cheap and very close to the hotel. I mean the airport. Two comments:

1) The Beijing Olympic Airportel was obviously converted from a trashy apartment building. The room had a balcony, but the balcony was walled off and I would've had to kick out the window screen to get to it. (See first photo.)

2) The Beijing Olympic Airportel was so small that there wasn't room for a shower stall/bathtub. (See second photo.)

The flight itself went smoothly but now I'm sleepy. I'm sleepy and in Santa Cruz with Anaïs and I'm glad to be home.

Hong Kong, Day 3

Oh I am so tired.

Today was a day for gift-buying and culture-absorbing. I went to the heritage museum. The first picture you see is shoes worn by women in the Cantonese Opera. They're stilt shoes and they're supposed to emulate the foot binding that used to go on here. I saw a picture of how these shoes are put on, and there doesn't seem to be much difference between these stilt shoes and actual foot binding.

Dots Obsession, Soul of Pumpkin

Back in the city after our hike, we were confronted with several inexplicable sights which can speak for themselves.

Hong Kong, Day 2 (cont'd)

More photos from our Peak hike. The first is a view south from the top of Hong Kong island, away from the majority of the skyscrapers. The next two are mall-related. The last is a little shrine to the Goddess of Mercy (says Michelle) that was so tucked-away that we missed it on our way up.

Hong Kong, Day 2

I tried to post this yesterday but the internet wasn't cooperating with me.

So yesterday I overslept and woke up at 9:45, which is a huge luxury when you consider the way the rest of this month has been going. It was a day of walking, is what it was. We hiked up to the top of Victoria Peak. Most people take a terrifying funniculare, but we were bold and took a footpath up. It was very slow going and we would've been frustrated, I think, except that we could check our pace against a nearby skyscraper and see that, for example, we'd hiked roughly 80 stories of vertical distance in around 45 minutes. Sweaty business.

Let me explain that last part. Victoria peak is a giant steep hill covered in thick foliage and for that reason it hasn't been built up like, uh, the entire rest of Hong Kong. Also I think it's a protected natural/historical site. So there's this beautiful, shaded nature trail in the middle of a forest of skyscrapers. Very bizarre. At the top of the peak are two malls. Hong Kong seems to be built around the principle that at any minute, you might have a Shopping Emergency, and the city has kindly protected us against this sort of emergency by putting retail opportunities absolutely everywhere.

Also we had dim sum, which apparently is mandatory.

A word about the first picture: Sunday is traditionally the day off for domestic workers. They don't want to hang out in their employer's houses (where they live and work), so they take to the streets in vast numbers and have an all-day picnic. They were absolutely everywhere on Hong Kong island. Well, everywhere they wouldn't get kicked out of. It was strange to see crowds of fairly poor people camped out in front of luxury shops like Bvlgari and Louis Vuitton, reading books and snoozing. They seemed fairly relaxed, but I think it's obvious that they wouldn't be out on the streets if they had anywhere else to go, and for that reason I felt sort of bad for them.

Hong Kong, Day 1 (cont'd)

Hong Kong, Day 1

In Beijing I had a lot of opportunities to learn about things that
were specifically and definitely Chinese. Hong Kong is a crazy polar
opposite of that - it might be the most multicultural town I've ever
been in besides Brooklyn. Maybe.

Here's what I mean by that. Tonight Michelle and I ate at an Indian
restaurant in a mall full of African Muslims, after which we went to
an Australian bar in which a band (composed chiefly of Filipinos) was
playing astonishing, amazing New Orleans ragtime music. A man from
South Africa sang "Basin Street Blues" and did a spectacular
impression of Louis Armstrong.

You know, multiculturalism.

There was also a laser light show somewhere in there, and I saw the
Hong Kong equivalent of the Hollywood walk of fame, complete with
Jackie Chan's handprints and a life-size statue of Bruce Lee. Oh,
also before all of this happened we hiked to the top of this hill and
saw the 10,000 Buddhas Monastery. There really were 10,000 Buddhas.

I like Hong Kong.

(PS. That second-to-last picture is of Bowring Street.)

Bei Da Tour

Binping and Guimei took some of us on a campus tour of Peking
University. It was lovely! Binping says William & Mary reminds him
of the campus here.

We randomly happened upon some sort of school-related rock climbing
event, so I got excited about that. Here are some pictures.

After that was a lab tour of their SRF-related facilities. It was
very nice, but I was exhausted. The big red thing is a 6 megavolt Van
De Graff generator - basically a machine that makes amounts of static
electricity that only seem appropriate for mad scientists.

Summer Palace

Towards the end of these conferences, the organizers usually take us
out somewhere cultural and feed us. Thursday afternoon we all got on
a bus and went to the Summer Palace, which is where the Emperor(s)
used to go to get away from the Forbidden City. A sort of Imperial
Chinese Camp David, I guess.

We ended up walking around for maybe three hours, which was great
since I'd been feeling pretty stagnant. And then the dinner was sort
of amazing. I think I had better food in Hohai, but the Summer Palace
had that place beat in terms of sheer fanciness.

So at the dinner I was just stuffing all kinds of food in my face
without really bothering to ask what it was. Long story short, I ate
some jellyfish without really realizing. It just looked like noodles,
but really, really chewy noodles. It tasted ok, but the chewing was
so much work that I just moved on to more efficient food.

Poster Session / Hohai

I was under the impression that after 10th grade my science fair days
were over. Nope!

Beijing Night Show

Photo Credit: Charlie Reece

Here's the basic format of the conference: The shuttle leaves from my
hotel for Peking University at 8 am. I spend the next 9 or 10 hours
listening to powerpoint talks, with an hour lunch break somewhere in
there. Then there's usually some sort of Evening Thing planned,
either by the conference organizing committee or by small groups of
us. It sounds stupid when I say it, but it's hard work to sit and
listen to this stuff for 10 hours a day, and I'm usually ready for bed
by 9 or 10.

Last night they put us on a bus a little early and shipped us off to
the Beijing Night Show. How can I possibly explain the Beijing Night
Show. It was a tourist-oriented exposition of Chinese culture and
history, but it was also dance-themed dinner theater. Mainly it was
people in fancy costumes doing traditionally-influenced modern
interpretive-style dance to incredibly loud modern music, but with
some acrobatics and kung fu thrown into the mix - a sort of
spectacular (in the literal sense) combination of Cirque du Soleil and
Disney World's Frontierland Review show. If it had been described to
me ahead of time I would've probably been pretty dismissive, but I
acutally had a great time.

Ok, so now I've got to sit and listen some more.

... aaaand a few more.

Last night we went and had some *real* Chinese food. It was
fantastic. My tongue went numb from spicy Szechuan green beans.

I've got to say, there's something to all this talk about pollution in
Beijing. The weather has been absolutely beautiful so far, but after
a day of walking around outside my throat felt pretty scratchy. In
"Pattern Recognition" William Gibson talks about different flavors of
hydrocarbons in different cities and I've got to say, I really notice
it here. Beijing has pollution that sort of smells like burning
marshmallows and lighter fluid. Washington DC has its own fair share
of smog, but I grew up in it so I'm less able to describe it, I think.
Anyway, we're lucky to be her in October - it's apparently pretty bad
during the Summer. They've been working on the air quality for a few
years now (relocating factories, expanding the surrounding grasslands,
etc.) and Beijing natives have told me that there's a very noticeable
improvement.

Jingshan Park

This park is right across the street from the Forbidden City. There's
a giant Buddha statue at the top of the hill, but they don't allow
photos of it.

Forbidden City Photos, 10/14