July 1 2009: An arrival and first thoughts

Note: this was composed on June 30th, and is only added today to the blog because I didn't have the blog until today.

Well, I’m here. On the whole, yesterday was a LONG day. After finishing packing at nearly the last minute, I got a full 3 hours of sleep, awoke at 4 AM, and was driven to the airport by my dad. The Chico-San Francisco flight is only 45 minutes long, but it felt the need to take place at 5:30 AM, so I had a 7 hour layover at SFO. There, I used the opportunity to watch a couple ridiculous movies I hadn’t seen yet (X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and Wanted, both of which made me laugh) and to study some Cantonese, and then I was on the plane to Hong Kong for 15 hours. The usual stuff happened on the plane: I watched a couple movies, tried to read my research papers, read part of the lackluster Star Wars novel Republic Commando: Order 66, and failed to get any sleep at all, more than a few winks. But I did arrive in Hong Kong

Customs was smooth sailing, except for the coughing fit I had shortly after I passed through the health inspection. It was purely my tired brain being unable to separate the biological processes of swallowing and breathing, but I was afraid I’d be quarantined for Swine Flu, or something equally unpleasant. But everything worked out, so no harm done.

The taxi ride from the airport to HKUST (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) was quite enjoyable: my driver had a weak grasp of the English language (still superior to my Cantonese, but for the moment that isn’t saying too much) and we tried to teach each other a few words in the opposite language. When I failed consecutively three times at pronouncing the tones correct for the Cantonese word for HKUST, he laughed to himself at the fact that I so obviously spoke Yi`ngme’n. Hong Kong is much more beautiful than I expected. I suppose I was expecting a massive city on the order of Seoul or Osaka, but it turns out to be rather unhomogeneous: massive high rise buildings are right on the edge of a forested mountain. I look forward to exploring more.

After wandering HKUST for a while, and a few failed (due to lack of being able to hear the other person) pay-phone calls to Jinbo, my grad-student contact, I finally came across Flora and Chandler near Dr. Wen’s office (didn’t know them, but they helped me anyway). They helped me contact Jinbo, who in turn helped me get dinner and lead me to my room in the Village. The room is, um, sketchy to say the least. The doorknob is non-functional (I lock it with a padlock in the day when I’m out, and barricade my door with my suitcase at night) the room is fairly dirty, and the communal bathroom looks rather uncared for (amusingly, the shower flexible hose has no showerhead), but it is a place to sleep. After I go out and buy sheets that don’t look filthy, turn my mattress into something not resembling a piece of plywood with a 20 year old foam pad on it (which it is), and maybe a pillow, I will probably be able to sleep much better than I did last night, which was in a series of three hour bursts.

Today is an official Hong Kong holiday, the twelfth anniversary of the reunification with the mainland. I will probably get some exploration in, and some badly needed cleaning of the room today. More later.

Update of hindsight: no cleaning or exploration occurred, except of the university itself. I learned very quickly that the geometry and self-similarity of many parts of HKUST means I can get lost in many novel ways every day.