That reads "Hong Kong International Airport" - so don't bother translating. I have a 15 hours' stop-over here and they wouldn't give me a hotel because my "Special Fare" ticket won't qualify. I don't care - there's free official Internet (with signs all over the place proclaiming so), there's a place that sells an edible veggie burger and loads of Chinese characters that I'm trying to read. The fact that they use traditional characters here doesn't help too much because I'm learning the simplified form. Here's an example with the n-phrase "international airport" in both simplified and traditional (the more complicated one):
国际机场
國際機場
Some characters are recognizable, some are horrendously different. Anyway, the 14-hour flight to HKIA was pretty good, with like only 2 or 3 hours that I was actually awake. They also honoured my request for an Indian vegetarian meal and I had some tasty stuff, some of which I can't actually put a name to and some that looked suspiciously like idlis. It's really nice how now almost all major carriers honour the request not only for a vegetarian meal, not only for an asian vegetarian meal, but an Indian vegetarian meal. Either people have realized that India exists thanks to all that outsourcing or perhaps our numbers have now become too large to reasonably ignore.
Oh, and I might have sold two iPod Shuffles on my way because both the security officials in both San Francisco and Hong Kong were like, "MP3 Player?" And I was like, "Yes". And then they asked "the new iPod?" I agreed. The SFO guy couldn't believe the thing stored 1GB of songs instead of the 75MB he thought it did (and I actually had to say "one thousand and twenty four megabytes" because apparently "gigabyte" was not in his dictionary); the HKG guy took it better.
Going further back in time, the CS final took place on Friday and it was damn hard. Not harder than expected because I did the practice final they gave out and that was damn hard too. I hope I manage to scrape something respectable, though, in this class, for the first time, I actually doubt it. I don't think I've ever gotten a non-A grade in CS, but with this class, the times are probably a-changing. In another nine and a half hours, the nice peeps at the registrar's office will presumably put up the grades on the Internet for our viewing pleasure, if, that is, you filled out and submitted all the teacher evaluations. If you haven't done so, you'll have to wait another couple of weeks before they show you your grades. Sometimes they achieve their goals by rewards, sometimes by punishment. History has shown that punishment works better. It's also more affordable. In fear of being parted from my grades for what would be an interminable period of time disguised as two weeks, I chose to fill out all the evaluations approximately five minutes after I got the email with the link in it. I don't pray, but those of you who do bother with the procedure, do append a little note at the end of your prayers for my grades, won't you? Thanks.
Also, finals' week was apparently when the time was ripe for watching musicals and plans were made and executed for watching two of them - The Sound of Music and The King and I. The first one I liked, the second one not as much. Western musicals are basically what regular Bollywood movies are, and regular Western movies are "art films" in Bollywood. I'm sure you knew that already, but there's no harm in reiterating. So, basically, there are songs in these movies every three to five minutes that have raison d'être ranging from 0 to negative infinity. That's okay when you have good songs because you like listening to them. On that note, The Sound of Music is where a lot of the "classic" English songs come from (the ones even Indians have heard some time during their lives). Unfortunately, the movie had no appreciable plot. The plot thing is true for The King and I as well except for the fact that I thought most of the songs completely sucked and some of them were rather unbearable. One of my roommates (the one who does not, in fact, read this journal) would call me a hater if I told him my actual thoughts on the matter because he considers the movie a "classic". Anyway, I've acquired the music from The Sound of Music and some of it's going to make its way into my ever-growing My Top Rated playlist. In fact, I think I shall do something about the "ever-growing" part and trim it a tad bit because I no longer enjoy of the tunes in it. That should hopefully eat up some of my time. Also, thank you for participating in my effort of killing time by reading this entry.
Some characters are recognizable, some are horrendously different. Anyway, the 14-hour flight to HKIA was pretty good, with like only 2 or 3 hours that I was actually awake. They also honoured my request for an Indian vegetarian meal and I had some tasty stuff, some of which I can't actually put a name to and some that looked suspiciously like idlis. It's really nice how now almost all major carriers honour the request not only for a vegetarian meal, not only for an asian vegetarian meal, but an Indian vegetarian meal. Either people have realized that India exists thanks to all that outsourcing or perhaps our numbers have now become too large to reasonably ignore.
Oh, and I might have sold two iPod Shuffles on my way because both the security officials in both San Francisco and Hong Kong were like, "MP3 Player?" And I was like, "Yes". And then they asked "the new iPod?" I agreed. The SFO guy couldn't believe the thing stored 1GB of songs instead of the 75MB he thought it did (and I actually had to say "one thousand and twenty four megabytes" because apparently "gigabyte" was not in his dictionary); the HKG guy took it better.
Going further back in time, the CS final took place on Friday and it was damn hard. Not harder than expected because I did the practice final they gave out and that was damn hard too. I hope I manage to scrape something respectable, though, in this class, for the first time, I actually doubt it. I don't think I've ever gotten a non-A grade in CS, but with this class, the times are probably a-changing. In another nine and a half hours, the nice peeps at the registrar's office will presumably put up the grades on the Internet for our viewing pleasure, if, that is, you filled out and submitted all the teacher evaluations. If you haven't done so, you'll have to wait another couple of weeks before they show you your grades. Sometimes they achieve their goals by rewards, sometimes by punishment. History has shown that punishment works better. It's also more affordable. In fear of being parted from my grades for what would be an interminable period of time disguised as two weeks, I chose to fill out all the evaluations approximately five minutes after I got the email with the link in it. I don't pray, but those of you who do bother with the procedure, do append a little note at the end of your prayers for my grades, won't you? Thanks.
Also, finals' week was apparently when the time was ripe for watching musicals and plans were made and executed for watching two of them - The Sound of Music and The King and I. The first one I liked, the second one not as much. Western musicals are basically what regular Bollywood movies are, and regular Western movies are "art films" in Bollywood. I'm sure you knew that already, but there's no harm in reiterating. So, basically, there are songs in these movies every three to five minutes that have raison d'être ranging from 0 to negative infinity. That's okay when you have good songs because you like listening to them. On that note, The Sound of Music is where a lot of the "classic" English songs come from (the ones even Indians have heard some time during their lives). Unfortunately, the movie had no appreciable plot. The plot thing is true for The King and I as well except for the fact that I thought most of the songs completely sucked and some of them were rather unbearable. One of my roommates (the one who does not, in fact, read this journal) would call me a hater if I told him my actual thoughts on the matter because he considers the movie a "classic". Anyway, I've acquired the music from The Sound of Music and some of it's going to make its way into my ever-growing My Top Rated playlist. In fact, I think I shall do something about the "ever-growing" part and trim it a tad bit because I no longer enjoy of the tunes in it. That should hopefully eat up some of my time. Also, thank you for participating in my effort of killing time by reading this entry.
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