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.