Terminal illness

After a lovely time in Xi'an, I arrived in Hong Kong with a miserable cold.  So my time here has been spent doing a little housekeeping and a little sleeping.  A week of using chopsticks and eating from a communal table has left telltale evidence of my ineptitude, so my winter shirts and jacket are hanging in the shower along with my socks and underwear.  

I managed to lose my power cord for my laptop, which I confirmed by organizing everything in my cabin in hopes I was wrong.  I was using the computer in the Xi'an airport, and I know I unplugged it and wrapped it up when we boarded, but somehow it did not make it home.  I am not enthusiastic about having to use an adaptor every time I recharge it outside of China, so I passed up the opportunity to replace it here.  There are enough macs on board that I should be able to borrow cords without putting undue strains on any friendships.

We are docked at Ocean Terminal in Kowloon, a place where you can get anything but a vasectomy.  (Maybe that, too.  I didn't actually check.)  There's a Toys R Us and a Cartier and everything in between.  If you want shoes, for example, on the sportswear wing you will find separate stores for Nike, Reebok, Adidas, Sketchers, New Balance, Puma, and Timberland (along with other stores selling outdoor and athletic clothing and gear).  And on the shoe wing, Jimmy Choo, Stride Rite, Birkenstock, Nine West, Shoe Box, Hush Puppies, Doc Martens, and ecco.  There is a whole wing devoted to children's clothing stores and another to purses.  Inexplicably, there's a basketball half court in between a coffee shop and an embarkation area for cruise ship passengers.

So it should not be a surprise to find out there are four separate lounges for feeding your baby, complete with bottle warming stations.  (There is, however, no baby formula to be found, according to a newspaper article I read.  The shortage has reached crisis proportions, reportedly because Chinese women believe that breastfeeding puts them at a disadvantage to their husband's mistresses.  Since Chinese formula is contaminated, American formula is in great demand.)

The Chinese New Year (abbreviated locally an CNY) starts tomorrow and stores are full of special foods, decorations, and trinkets.  I saw apples (huge apples!) masked or treated somehow so that Chinese characters appear on the surface, lighter than the rest of the apple.  Almost every store has a potted kumquat or mandarin orange tree.

We are not allowed to bring any of these goodies back on board—no flowers, fresh fruit, or anything that is not sealed.  Sometimes the crew winks at infractions, but you cannot be sure.  I've carried water bottles in with water still in them, but a student would get busted for that.  (Students fill them with vodka.  Students also tape flasks to their legs.)  I would love to have a bag of oranges—you could get rich selling oranges—but it's not worth the risk of having them thrown away.

Still, it was exciting to return to the ship and see all the provisioning going on.  Boxes and boxes of fresh fruits and vegetables!  The next day, there were grapes at lunch, and you would have thought they were caviar. 

The working areas of the ship are strictly off limits to us, and they are quite a mystery.  Somehow, in the unmapped areas, they fit in the crew cabins, lounge, and gym, as well as a water treatment plant, an incinerator, a kitchen to feed thousands, and the area we call "Walmart," where all the provisions come from.  (Food as well as office supplies.)  Intellectually, we are all prepared to "do without," but in fact, there is very little that you can't find on board.  

Even a spare power supply for my computer.