The bus trip in from the airport last night showed that the weather was cloudy and the roads were wet. I woke this morning to very heavy grey skies. The expected temperature is 23C with 100% humidity! That is, rain all day. I just looked out the window (8:30am), and the cloud cover is really low.
So I’ll wander in to the Harbour City shopping mall which adjoins the hotel, and take a look at some of the 700 stores here. I doubt I’ll buy anything, but I *might* indulge in a good massage in one of the day spas as my body is pretty wrecked from all the driving and the sitting in aircraft. And a foot massage/reflexology wouldn’t go astray either!
If the shopping mall all gets too much (lights, noise, people, stuff I have no intention of buying), and it’s still raining, I’ll probably come back to the room and upload photos etc. It’s definitely not a good day for walking around or touring. I’m really close to the ferry terminals to Hong Kong Island, but I doubt I could see much across the water either.
Update: Two plus hours of walking mall hallways = sore feet! I spent $1 on some tea filter papers, and $3 on two cans of Diet Coke, plus $7 on a Beef Laksa for brunch. And that was it. I’m just not in to label brands and this shopping mall is FULL of stores like Yves St Laurent, Burberry, Cartier, Nike, Sony, Bose, etc., all 700 of them… I was able to get glimpses of the harbour from some of the windows, but as I expected, the weather, the day, and the views were very ordinary. So it was back to the hotel room to write this, do some computer ‘chores’, and take a jet lag nap!
Update 2: One of the things on my ‘to do’ list for when I got home was to edit and convert the digital recording I did of my conference presentation into an MP3 and make it available on my website. So that’s what I did this afternoon and evening – downloaded Audacity and taught myself how to do this. It’s not available on the website yet – I’ll upload all my conference presentation material at once after I get back. Because I didn’t finish until after 9pm (yes, this process took some 8+ hours), I decided not to bother with dinner. I know I’ll get at least one, possibly two, great meals on the flight tomorrow. And the Cathay Pacific lounge will have lots of snacks, so I may even skip breakfast too.
Rhonda Bracey: At Random 