Saturday, August 16, 2008

Flight home

The island geography of Hong Kong,
as seen through my plane window.

Well, as I type this now, we have only about four hours left in the air! I guess that means I’ve been traveling for about twenty hours by now, but I think the way the layover was scheduled made the return journey feel less arduous than the first trip. We have been hitting all kinds of turbulence on the flight from Hong Kong to New York, and trying to sleep on planes is still one of the more miserable physical experiences I’ve encountered, but I will say again that Cathay Pacific is amazing. The staff are so sweet and attentive it almost feels unfair, and you are never far from fresh glasses of water, cups of tea, bowls of soup and packets of snacks (four kinds!) – never neglected in dehydrated darkness for hours at a time. Once 6pm EST (5am Bangkok time) rolled around, I began to I feel like I’m getting a second wind that will hopefully last until I get home around midnight tonight.

Closing in on Hong Kong -- the city from the air.

Three of the major things I had planned for the return journey – Skyping my family from Hong Kong,* buying a particular grape konjac snack at Muji, and getting work done on my final BIOCEP presentation – didn’t work out so well, but I’ve certainly been living it up with the extensive menu of movies, TV shows, and music that the airplane provides for entertainment. So far, I’ve built my own iTunes-esque playlist (classical Indian music!), kept tabs on the Olympic medal count (question: do we primarily rank countries by number of golds or by total medals? because if the latter then we are so kicking China’s butt), and munched on several packets of oddly-appropriate** Cathay Pacific snacks while watching The Other Boleyn Girl (Eric Bana looks less like Christian Bale in this one than in other movies), The Last Samurai (just as good as I remembered it being), and 21 (which had so many shots of Harvard/MIT/Cambridge/Boston I felt homesick!).

*couldn’t get the much-vaunted free wifi to work.
**because I ate Scottish shortbread cookies while watching Mary Queen of Scots being beheaded in the first, Japanese chocolate wafers and green tea while watching the second, and pretzels shaped like hearts, clubs, spades, and diamonds while watching the last. And it wasn’t even on purpose!

Touchdown!

I also had a great time of it in Hong Kong. In addition to hitting up the ever-popular Muji store in the terminal that services Cathay Pacific, I broke the promise I made to myself last summer that I would never drink the foul-tasting variety of tea known as pu-erh tea ever again. I'm not sure what made me do it... I think I was seduced by the classy tea-connoisseur ambiance that surrounds many of the tea stores in Hong Kong into trying something exotic. I love buying tea in Hong Kong because they somehow combine the English fervor for elegant presentation of tea with the Chinese passion for unique varieties of green, white, oolong, and others. The rose pu-erh tea was miles better than the sickly-sweet iced pu-erh I'd reluctantly consumed in Taiwan, and made a nice prelude to the other Hong Kong snacks I enjoyed during my layover.

Rose pu-erh tea -- a risk that paid off.

Side note: I think posts like this make pretty clear that the amount of blogging that goes on is directly proportional to the amount of time I have to do it, rather than the amount of interesting things I actually have to say… Blogging this trip was a real challenge because of technological constraints – picture uploading was maddeningly slow when it worked at all, which was infrequently, half-written blog posts would be lost because the server connection was reset (or something like that), some posts just failed to show up at all – and also because of the ultra-packed schedule we had. I have no complaints about how busy they kept us. For a conference that only lasts two weeks (rather than six or nine), such business makes sense, and I think I might have been disappointed if we had been given more spare time. Still, it cut into my blogging and that made me sad, because one of the biggest kicks I get out of traveling is the thought that I can share it (in some small way) with the people I care about who aren’t there with me.

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