Long flights coupled with the fact that they had these really rigorous checks for whether you were carrying any liquids or gels with you made some things slightly irritating. And that's how I've had to buy new shaving foam because they confiscated my old one, that too at IGIA. At Hong Kong, they didn't just X-ray luggage but in fact went through each and every piece of baggage manually, which did slow down boarding procedures quite a bit. However, I do enjoy Cathay Pacific Airlines. A large part of that is because the stopover is Hong Kong International Airport (or HKIA), which is a beautiful place to spend some stopover hours at and has a few kiosks where you can browse the Internet (though admittedly on G3 iMacs from the 1990's running Mac OS 9). Another reason why I prefer Cathay Pacific over China Airlines is because Cathay actually feels like a proper "International" carrier. It's not like China was lacking in the facilities department… it's just that they didn't care about certain somewhat important things like talking to their passengers in a polite manner or making discernable announcements. That irritated me. In my opinion, if you're an international airline, you sort-of have to make proper announcements in, let's see: English (because it's so awesome), the language spoken at the destination city, the language spoken at the city of departure, and the language of the airline's native country. In most cases, these overlap and there should thus be announcements in two or three languages. Also, you've got to make sure that the person making the announcement speaks the language fluently and can say stuff that others can understand. This is something that Cathay gets but China doesn't.

Anyway… I'm kind-of insanely happy to be back here… it feels like Hogwarts (though, again admittedly, that's just an assumption). Memories of last year are fond and I somewhat miss being a freshman. Now that I know how quickly each year passes by, I don't get any comfort out of the fact that I have "three whole years" left. Sigh… well that's just how much I love this place and the people here. In other news, I'm mostly all set up here (which means that I have (a) my comforter and (b) my computer) and since I didn't have a monitor to go with my Mac mini and didn't want to buy one, my boss lent me one. Isn't that awesome? Also, I'm clearly feeling the need for more USB ports on Mac minis. The new ones have one more but seriously, Mac minis need to have like ten USB ports to be even mildly serviceable in this age when practically everything connects using USB. And don't tell me to use a USB hub because, unless I get a powered one, I can't connect a ton of devices using hubs and my external hard drive doesn't work well whe connected using a hub.

Anyway, I'm sleepy, there's more unpacking to be done tomorrow and I need to go shopping for books.

Labels: English