I am now in Hong Kong (and all my web pages are loading in Chinese)

(yeah, everything's coming up in Chinese. Stupid IP address).

Finally made it! I can't really tell how many hours of travel it was, but I left yesterday morning at 8:20 and arrived in town (including crossing the international date line and time changes) around 10pm. I don't know... 20 hours? I had about a 1.5 hour layover in NY, and then a 4 hour layover in Tokyo (plus we seemed to sit at the gate for a while), so it looks like 1 hour (Bos to NY) + 13 hours (NY to Tokyo) and 3.5 hours (Tokyo to Hong Kong) + 5.5 hours of layovers = 22 hours? 23? I am so tired now I can't even add.

So anyway, the Hong Kong airport if very nice. People are very friendly. But I've gotta say that no one matches Tokyo for consistency of niceness (again, I'm almost too tired to think). They even let me bring my canteen even though there was, as I said to the guard, "I don't know, just a little bit left". She simply smiled and said "that's ok". And they didn't even mention my alarm clock in my carryon bag. That item got the guards at Boston to swap my carryons and admonish me to put the clock in the checked bag next time (actually my idea, but he agreed). Oh Japan, you're people are so accomodating. I look forward to popping in again July 4th.

Of course the real fun starts when the taxi takes me to the "hostel" that I'm renting a room from. I supposedly made a reservation for a single room, but when I got here today, the guy at the front desk (who spoke no English, and didn't even recognize my pronounciation of his establishment. I take blame for that one) had no idea how to help me. Luckily, a very nice young man was walking by and offered to help. We'll call him Li (Lee?), since that's the name he gave. He talked with the desk guy for a bit and it turns out that I'm supposed to talk to the people in room 717, to get my key. The thing is, the people who work in that room leave at 5.

As you probably noticed when I started this post, the time was significantly after 5. Now, the guy at the desk had no problem with me simply "com[ing] back tomorrow at 9" (note: notice the lawyerly use of the []'s to slightly modify The verb? Yeah, I write legal papers), but that kind of didn't really work for me. And then my white knight Li steps up and says "hey, we have a spare bed in our room, so you can crash with us tonight" (that sounded much less gay in my head before I typed it). At least, that's the phrasing he would have used back home. In real life, he was much more formal, though no less generous. What an offer! Super nice guy; PhD student at Hong Kong University in physics, pretty good English, friendly and talkative. His roommate is currently playing WoW (look it up) with his buddy and I'm lying in a very 70's-ish bed above a desk. It's like I'm an undergrad!

So that's where things stand now. I can only hope that I wake up in one piece tomorrow. I'm pretty confident that I will, but if this is the last post, you'll know why.

Even though getting here was pretty painful (that 4 hour flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong really hurt. Literally. I was so tired and sick of traveling at that point), and I didn't have a room, it's looking pretty good. Li seems like a good guy (so long as I wake up in one piece tomorrow morning), hopefully they'll still have a private room for me so I don't have to go undergrad style for a month, and I get to explore a wonderful city.

And now... I pass out.