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.