Hello from Hong Kong

So I’ve arrived safe and sound after my 15 hour flight. As the photo above reveals… I’m a bit tired. I’m going to stay up as late as possible in an attempt to get myself on HK time, even though my body is telling me it’s 6:30am and I should probably go to sleep.

It was a little touch and go when we arrived at the airport. We flew Cathay Pacific and apparently our tickets were booked as “employee class” tickets – which basically means we were standby. We get to the check-in counter, and of course our plane is getting close to the weight limit and they won’t know if we’d be able to board until everyone else has cleared. Everyone I spoke to said it wasn’t looking good, so I just assumed we weren’t making our flight. Luckily that didn’t happen, and we eventually got on.

While we were checking in, I had inquired if we could be moved to bulkhead seats, and unbeknownst to us, we were upgraded to business class. Sweet! You just can’t complain about free champagne, actual meals and a seat that fully reclines into a bed. I’m actually amazed how quickly the time passed – I ended up working for a good portion of the flight, watched a few movies and slept for a bit. It didn’t feel like 15 hours, that’s for sure.

So now I’m in Hong Kong. I’ve got a 2 hour presentation tomorrow at 2:30, and I’m free to explore until Sunday afternoon thereafter. I’m not quite sure what I’m going to do yet – I’ve got a guidebook and a few maps… that should be enough to get around. It looks as if the majority of signage is in English as well, so hopefully my exploration will be relatively painless. Regardless, you can expect to see a ton of photos when I return.

Speaking of which – Jess and I spent the Thanksgiving long weekend up in San Francisco. I managed to take 487 photos while we were there (thank god for digital photography) and have uploaded a bunch of them here if you’re interested.