I went to Asia

and all I brought back was this lousy case of SARS.

Just kidding. (Although no one laughs. What, SARS jokes aren't funny any more?) Have spent the last week coughing and moaning and clutching my sad sore throat, in between thrashing about fitfully while "asleep," mainly because each night I dream that I am still on the plane home from China.

Of course, I'm awake enough to realize that I'm naked, and asleep enough to think I'm sitting in between my boss and her boss, with whom I made the trip. This makes for some horribly disorienting moments at 2, 3, 4 a.m. Thankfully, that has started to taper off. More photos when I get a chance.

Kowloon at night

Breakfast in Hong Kong

The view from the breakfast room at my hotel:
I ordered pancakes. I thought they would be larger than silver dollars.

Morning commute in Hong Kong: Every bit as bad as 520 across Lake Washington, although with more bamboo and less BMWs.
To get to Hong Kong from Kowloon, you travel under the water. UNDER. THE. WATER. These are things that make one consider the differences between U.S. standards of construction and Chinese standards of construction.

But the view of Hong Kong in the distance - that's about 1/4 of the HK skyline - makes things considerably easier to take. HK itself is canyons of skyscrapers.
Victoria Harbour. There were plenty of modern boats, but there were also many many little wooden fishing boats too - like motorized junks, with old tires around the sides of the boats to keep them from smashing into one another. Mostly they just bounce off one another. Kowloon in the distance.

Lazy-ass blogger alert

I've been running around like crazy, getting ready for a spur-of-the-moment business trip to Parts Afar. This entailed flying my ass down to San Francisco late Monday to get a visa to Foreign Parts, and then dashing around having things translated and printed and packed. At times my head felt full of cotton.

But now I am ensconed in the comfort of the Northwest Airlines lounge in, of all places, Portland, Ore. Do you know they will give you free drinks here? And cheese and crackers? It's like they read my mind. I love traveling, I love the entire getting-on-a-plane gestalt.

But it unsettles me, too. For years I've thought, "When I'm on the plane, I'll use the entire time to write," but when I click that seatbelt shut, I'm in a different world. It's not a creating world; it's a looking out the window, accepting any beverage that comes my way, reclining kind of world. Cotton-brained. I am floating, in more ways than one. Plane time is rarely productive time for me, and I like it like that.

Anyway, posting may be scarce for the next 10 days; we'll just have to see whether Foreign Parts will let me blog.