Sunday, July 23, 2006
Killing Time in Hong Kong
My and Nian's trip to Singapore and Malaysia is over and I'm glad to report we survived, but after a tearful goodbye we had to separate for another 4 month time apart. We had a few tense moments and trying times especially when Malaysia refused Nian's first entry attempt on her Singapore visa. This turned out to be bad information from several sources and ended up with her having to fly in to satisfy entry requirements, but as I said this later turned out to be bad info. Later we missed our flight to our jump off point to Redang Island, so the center piece of our trip -- our 2 day 3 night island getaway -- ended up whittled down to 2 days 1 night. More like 1 day 1 night with a late arrival and an early departure. To say Nian was initially distraught would be an understatement, but in the end it seemed no great tragedy as we both got mildly sunburned on the first day out, and the only real activity other than the ocean beach was snorkel diving. I got one snorkeling session in and that seemed adequate.
Just now I came close to losing my post, but fortunately I had just saved my edits so far. I'm using a terminal that times out after 30 minutes, but I had actually had far less, as I was using the end of someone else's 30 minutes after they had left. Now I have a fresh 30 minutes and the clock is ticking. I need to board my flight to Chicago in about 30 minutes anyway, so that works out well. An hour ago I had struggled to do this post on an iMac in a general internet use area with no 30-minute time period. But the iMac would freeze up with the dreaded iMac bomb icon every so often in the internet Explorer session, most likely if one hit the backspace key to do a correction, and believe me I hit the backspace key often. I suspect the iMacs are quite old and the Explorer version looked like something very ancient. I don't whether to blame the early Mac 9 OS or the crappy Microsoft browser. So here I am at a much more recent windows machine and am using Firefox. I'm still saving my drafts often. The 30-minute clock is ticking and I didn't note the actual time it started.
Here in the terminal I notice quite a few people being given rides on electric carts. The rate would indicate they paid somewhere around $10 for the trip. The carts' signs indicate the advantage would be a quick journey from one end of the terminal to the other if you were in a hurry. However I saw the carts stopping often for pedestrians who were in no hurry to get out of the way. A brisk walk or trot would outpace the carts easily. Unlike the corpulent Wal-Mart shoppers you see using the free electric carts for shopping these people all looked fairly robust, so either they underestimated the timesavings, or are just well moneyed enough that $10 means very little to them.
Well that's enough for now, I have to scoot, on my own feet mind you, to terminal 63 -- home is still about 18-20 hours away (yawn).
Just now I came close to losing my post, but fortunately I had just saved my edits so far. I'm using a terminal that times out after 30 minutes, but I had actually had far less, as I was using the end of someone else's 30 minutes after they had left. Now I have a fresh 30 minutes and the clock is ticking. I need to board my flight to Chicago in about 30 minutes anyway, so that works out well. An hour ago I had struggled to do this post on an iMac in a general internet use area with no 30-minute time period. But the iMac would freeze up with the dreaded iMac bomb icon every so often in the internet Explorer session, most likely if one hit the backspace key to do a correction, and believe me I hit the backspace key often. I suspect the iMacs are quite old and the Explorer version looked like something very ancient. I don't whether to blame the early Mac 9 OS or the crappy Microsoft browser. So here I am at a much more recent windows machine and am using Firefox. I'm still saving my drafts often. The 30-minute clock is ticking and I didn't note the actual time it started.
Here in the terminal I notice quite a few people being given rides on electric carts. The rate would indicate they paid somewhere around $10 for the trip. The carts' signs indicate the advantage would be a quick journey from one end of the terminal to the other if you were in a hurry. However I saw the carts stopping often for pedestrians who were in no hurry to get out of the way. A brisk walk or trot would outpace the carts easily. Unlike the corpulent Wal-Mart shoppers you see using the free electric carts for shopping these people all looked fairly robust, so either they underestimated the timesavings, or are just well moneyed enough that $10 means very little to them.
Well that's enough for now, I have to scoot, on my own feet mind you, to terminal 63 -- home is still about 18-20 hours away (yawn).
