Off again

Happy Memorial Day weekend! I am heading to Hong Kong.

Again. This time I’m going with the mom of the family with which I went to Disney. Her husband had been med evac’d prior to Disney and she hasn’t had a chance to take a quiet weekend, so this is it.

Seeing the “Big Budda” and visiting the night market are on the agenda, but that’s subject to change. It’s been really rainy this past week so who knows what we will wind up doing.

She’s only staying one night – springing for a hotel this time; we’re splitting the room – but I am going to the hostel again for Sunday evening because I’ve lined up both a podiatrist appointment and a dental check-up on Monday morning.

Although I’m pretty sure I could have found a dentist here, I will be there and it’s a regular work day for locals so I can get it done with no time off.

At work, we have interns coming in for the summer. They are non-paid positions, which I get a kick out of solely because I know of so many journalists that believe that only in journalism are interns unpaid. Uh, no.

But anyway, there are 3-4 in now and although we usually have housing for them, sometimes it’s in between normal people’s tours (as if anyone who works where I work could be considered “normal” so far as jobs are concerned!) This first week, the housing wasn’t available, so they asked for volunteers to house some of them.

As a result, for this week only, I have two college kids. I feel kind of bad for them, because they were probably expecting some cool 20something to show them the finer Guangzhou places (like this “party pier” I’ve heard of) but they wound up with Mom.

But a trusting mom. They have security clearances, so I’m just giving them keys and then leaving them alone. Still continuing with my plans to go to Hong Kong. Leaving in about 10 minutes.

They seem fine so far, although one has struck me as being a lot more high maintenance than the other. They did not know each other previously; they just happened to arrive on the same day. I hope they get along because they’re stuck with each other this weekend. Although they went into the office today, they didn’t really have time to meet the other interns enough to set up weekend plans or anything, I don’t think.

One’s a guy and one’s a girl. The guy’s from Texas who’s going to school in Nebraska, the girl is a military offspring so she’s been around. I forget where she was going to school, but she’ll be a senior and did this same internship program last year. And has mentioned it about 19 times so far.

She will be in my department, but the guy I probably won’t see too much at work.

These are very prestigious internships so they’ve got to both be pretty smart. They were too jetlagged for me to tell, but they seem OK. I pointed them to my movies and showed them the gym/pool, etc., so I’m sure they’ll muddle through the weekend and recover from jet lag all right.

You’ve got mail! Soon, anyway.

Yesterday, I had a wonderful afternoon visiting with a colleague and his wife and son. The day consisted of great conversation, a fun almost 2-year-old, the discovery of a really nice and serene park (on a very low pollution day, too!)  and some awesome chicken pesto.

For someone who doesn’t get out much, it was fantastic.

And yet it wasn’t quite the highlight of the week.

Sadly, the highlight was something that will likely appear to be mundane and trite to anyone else, but it’s a life-changer here.

I do a lot of Peace Corps question answering, and one of the questions that came up this week was what were the similarities and differences between Peace Corps and foreign service.

My answer on the similarities is simply that they are both overseas (although FS does have a lot of domestic positions) and federal.

But the differences. They’re legion. I just ordered a case of Junior Mints from Amazon, which will be delivered to me via diplomatic pouch. That doesn't happen in PC. I also have a Target order coming to me, and I still subscribe to Netflix.

And now, thanks to a colleague, I have learned that Walmart delivers groceries to the pouch.

This is big. I already have a weakness for Amazon and its availability of Junior Mints and Slap Ya Mama!, although they are considerably overpriced and, in the instance of the Junior Mints, only available in bulk.

And now my colleague tipped me off that customers can order non-perishable groceries online and have them shipped. I cannot get liquids shipped to me, but I can get quasi-liquids, like toothpaste.

The best part is you can order one of whatever it is, and the prices are the same as they are in the store.

Sugar, which I did not include in my first $60 order, which I hope to have by the second week in June, is about $2.50 or something for four pounds. Here, it’s a staggering $3 or so for a half a kilo. I do get a cost of living allowance to help offset that, but if I can get the stuff for less, why not?

The food is also the American version of whatever it is. In some cases, like the case of Cheetoes, that’s really good. Cheetoes here are vile.

Of course, like Target, you can also order pretty much everything else, too. The bizarreness in that is that on some items, you’re ordering from a U.S. company that imported the stuff from here and now it’s being shipped back. And it’s still cheaper than it would cost on the local economy.

So yeah, between that and the fact that I ate meat twice this week, I’m not in PC anymore.

The quarter mile post

It occurred to me that I’ve now been in Guangzhou for six months. It crept up on me somehow; sure went fast.

That means I’m a quarter of the way done with my first post. That’s some kind of accomplishment, I guess, although I can’t really quantify it.

Early on, I started on language classes, but they got cut due to funding. I muddled through to now, and now we’ve been green-lighted to start the beginner class again. Only at this point, a quarter done, I feel like if I’ve muddled through I can continue to do so. I’m not entirely sure about that, though.

But I don’t see mastering it, or even becoming proficient. I’m just not sure if it’s a valuable use of time from here on out.

The timeline with State is a bit different than the real world. Even though I have a year and a half to go at this post, in just six more months (give or take), I will already know the site of my next. It should be something like January when I “bid,” or make my preferences known. As I understand it, I will get a list – like last time – and be able to rank however many are on there and my preferences will be taken into consideration, but not guaranteed.

Like my first post, though, I still don’t really care. It’s two years; I figure I can do whatever in wherever for two years at a time. After the second post, I’ll have more say in where I go, but it’ll still be one to three years, mostly two, at a time. Maybe by then I’ll care.

It’s sort of weird. You’re hired as a career candidate, hopefully get tenured, but still have to apply for jobs every other year or so.

Between this posting and the next, though, I will get not only “home leave” but also (inchallah) some more training. That could include language for up to six months, but I won’t know until bidding if that is even possible. But it is feasible that I spend the winter of 2016 in Washington. Go Caps.

And I’m still plugging away here. Honestly, I’ve no idea how some of these people made it without me.

There’s still not much of a social life. Unless I am out of town, I don’t do much on weekends. We had a crew of three hit a popular breakfast place on Saturday and watched a movie in the apartment’s theater today. Someone got “Catching Fire” through Netflix and we set a time to watch that.

This week has been rainy and the pipes outside my kitchen make the kitchen smell like it’s been flooded with swamp gas. This has happened twice, but I am still not sure what is causing it. Both times, it’s been during rain, but right now it’s raining and it smells fine. I think it’s the giant pipe outside, but I can’t be sure. And I am not sure how to convey the stink to maintenance.

The apartment overall is still awesome. Granted, my kitchen is tiny, but if I’m going to be stunk out, I’m fine with small.

Weird things continue to happen. My air filters have this little digital magnet on it, telling me how many days I have left to change the filter and I learned that at 14 days it starts to blink blue. It’s annoying, but I have so many lights flashing into my apartment I only notice if I’m looking in that direction.

Walking into the bathroom yesterday, I saw more flashing lights. Green ones, on my ceiling. And not where there were normal lights. Now, I have odd lighting at times. The gorgeous Canton Tower sometimes shoots lights into my apartment, but that’s into the bedroom, not the bathroom. This was the bathroom.

I went to the window and looked down at the mini-golf course, and someone had laid out a red carpet, little tables and spotlights, which were the culprits invading my bathroom.

It was a wedding, and lucky for the bride and groom the storms predicted for the weekend didn’t hit them. They’ve come before and after, but it appeared that the wedding went off without a hitch.

I can’t remember having spotlights at a wedding before, though, but I guess it worked for the happy couple.

Happy birthday, Daddy and happy Mother’s Day Zippy.

Leila was here in spirit

Thursday was a holiday here, and although I worked on Friday I took off this weekend and headed to Disneyland in Hong Kong.

I really want Leila to be able to come here and do it, so I took this trip as a scouting adventure. If she can’t come, I wanted to do what she, Chip and Riley would have done.

So I spent today at the Happiest Place on Earth with a colleague, her husband and three kids. Well, two and a half kids. The youngest, who is 7 months old, pretty much slept in his stroller all day long.

The other two: a 6-year-old boy and a girl who’s 4.

For three children, three adults are necessary. Seriously, I have no idea how the parents could have done that without me, and I wouldn’t have had near as much fun had I gone alone. Especially when the boy asked to go on the Runaway Mine Cart roller coaster a second time – I thanked him, telling him I was glad he did because I did, too!

The general rule was that I and a parent would take the two older kids, but toward the end both parents sat out more and I took them alone – the dad had recently had knee surgery and was still recuperating and the mom gets motion sickness.

I did take a turn at sitting out, but it was on the second go-around of Mystic House, which was kind of a Haunted House redeaux that worked. Think, sort of, Haunted House crossed with the “furniture comes alive” part of “Beauty and the Beast” with a monkey. (Don’t think too hard – it worked, and it was fun.)

Despite this being a holiday weekend, there were virtually no lines.  The longest we waited was for Dumbo. Like 30 or 40 minutes; I have no idea why.

They had two kinds of rides: carnival-like ones and Disney ones. Dumbo was a carnival-like one. Those lasted only something like a minute, which was a lousy payoff for standing in line even if the lines were short.

The Tilt-a-Whirl-like ride (Slinky Dog from Toy Story; he chased his tail), I swear, only did the circle four times. They were amazingly short.

But the “real” Disney rides, like Winnie the Pooh (which, so far as I could tell, was almost the same as the Orlando one, but I never saw a Hidden Mickey) and It’s a Small World (also, as they say in Asia, same same but different) lasted longer. I introduced the family to FastPass, which went over well. We only had to FP Pooh, though. There were just no lines.

The teacup ride did not go over well with the family and we did that right before lunch. (I made it a point not to do it after) and we headed to Space Mountain after a fairly Cantonese meal of, for me, beef and rice.

Up until then, the dad and I had been taking the kids because the mom said she got motion sickness easily, but said she was good with speed. So she went with us.

The boy and I were in the front and the girl and her mom were behind us.

As I do in Orlando, I laughed maniacally throughout the ride, but as soon as it kicked in, I heard the mom scream something like, “What was I thinking?” The other two were completely silent. It terrified them. The mom said the girl (remember, she’s 4) had slunk down and would have gone into the fetal position if the seat bar thing would have allowed it.

No way should those kids have gone on that. It scared them to death. The rest of the day, when they misbehaved, the threat was "I'll make you go on Space Mountain again!" It worked pretty good, too!

However, the Thunder Mountain Railroad copy – Runaway Mine Carts or something like that – was fantastic. It went backwards more than the Expedition Everest. Mom and Daughter sat that one out but Son and I did it twice in a row.

Scarily, it had been shut down when we arrived at the Grizzly Gulch area and, after putzing around there, the tech people said it would be open in half an hour to an hour. We went looking for something else and had gone in the wrong direction, and when we circled back not five minutes later the roller coaster was going. So Son and I ran on and did it. Twenty-five minutes after being told half an hour to an hour, we’d done the thing twice.

Similar time estimation for this electric car thing. Thirty minute wait to get on the ride, we were told, but 20 minutes later we were stepping off the ride.

But when Mickey and Minnie were posing for pictures and took a break, the “they’ll be back in three minutes” turned into about 10. But I did get my photo taken with them, although it’s on the family’s camera.

Yeah, as an aside, if you go to Disney with the intent to document it for, say, Leila, be sure to charge your batteries. I got a few but not as much as I intended.

Toy Story land made me think of Leila, too! She’ll LOVE it. Fortunately for me, the Army Parachute Drop was closed (I am scared of it but would have gone had the kids wanted to), so I was quite relieved there was no temptation but we did Slinky Dog Ride and RC’s Race Car thing. THAT astounded me; not that it existed but that I went on it.

It was a U-shaped roller coaster, as it, that’s all it was. You got into this race car – it sat about 20 – and went up and down the U maybe four times total, building steam and really only hitting the *very* top once. So it was eight back-and-forths, and believe me, I verified that before I got on. That is just not my ride.

After being assured it was only 60 seconds, I got in. Would you believe it malfunctioned? We went our turn and I thought, gee, that was quick, but the realized they'd stopped us before we got to the highest go-around. We’d only done two passes, so about half the ride.

They brought us back to the bottom of the U and I thought we were done or it was broken so I tried to get out of the seat but the seat belt/bar was still locked. I looked over at the booth thing where the operator was to check for clues and he was trying to get OUT of the booth, but somehow he couldn’t get out. Locked in or something. I was like, you have got to be kidding me!

But they got the ride restarted and it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. Essentially I just closed my eyes on the upswing. I didn’t mind the going backward and up, but I didn’t like being able to see the rush to the sky. But in the end I went on the one that terrified me one and a half times.

Here is a YouTube of that ride, not done by me:

Toy Story land was a lot of fun and really, my favorite part of the park. I just liked how it was done – there were Tinker Toys as architecture, a building made out of Lincoln Logs and Andy’s Toy Box, the store.

What I didn’t understand, though, was that Slotted Pig – Ham, I mean – was nowhere to be found. I have no comprehension of that at all.

But it was fun. We were there from about 10 a.m. -- when it opened -- until 6 p.m. or so. You take the metro all the way, so it's convenient. It cost less than the "full sized" Disneys but I really think we did it thoroughly in one day. I mean, had I gone alone, I would have been done by 1 p.m. -- although I would have filled up the extra time to go on Space Mountain again and again.

Next time, the mom suggested that we go a bit later in the morning and stay later in the evening, for the fireworks. There is a Main Street USA and all that, so it would be nice to see.