Posted by Seth on December 2, 2011 under News | 
Airbus CEO John Leahy is claiming that United Airlines is likely to order the A380 according to a story being carried by Aviation Week. Putting aside the fact that they have been advertising the story with some incredibly misleading headlines suggesting that the order is imminent, there are still issues with the story. Not the least of which is that Leahy actually states that the order is not imminent, though he absolutely seems convinced that the order is coming.
I’m not saying there is an order soon, but United understands that if it wants to have a major presence in Asia it needs the A380.
Airbus has already given up on Delta; the company has indicated it will pursue a policy of smaller widebody aircraft, so United is the only North American carrier left for the manufacturer to try to bring on board.
That leaves United as our target.
There are so many things that don’t add up here. For starters, United has committed to ordering the A350-900. Assuming that shows up eventually it will meet the needs of a multi-hub carrier on many routes that the 747-400s currently operate on. And United has more A350s on order than they have 747s currently in service. On top of that, United has a whole bunch of 787 Dreamliner orders in the pipeline, with initial deliveries currently expected at some point next year.
The A380 is great if you have a huge number of customers that need to be moved between two points – namely hubs – and from which you will then move them on smaller planes after the fact to their eventual destination. The numbers seem to work quite nicely for single-hub carriers where all the passengers can be funneled through a single point. But an operation that has nine hubs needs more flexibility in terms of routes and frequencies.
On top of that, the implication that it is needed to provide service in Asia doesn’t seem to match United’s current route map or indicated plans. There are scarce few intra-Asia routes and those are mostly tag-ons. Replacing those with non-stop 787 service from North American gateways seems much more likely to actually address the demand than flying larger aircraft to the Tokyo hub or Hong Kong.
Oh, and Leahy’s observation that the US airports are already too crowded, while accurate, ignores the fact that much of that congestion is slot hoarding by regional aircraft, flights that are easy for the carriers to scrap if they decide they want to fly bigger aircraft, and the entire premise of the demand Leahy is drawing falls apart pretty quickly.
Oh, and if they really do want a bigger plane don’t forget there’s that Boeing 747-8i out there that is desperate to rack up a few sales to keep the program alive.
The headline certainly got a lot of attention and got folks to read the story, but that doesn’t mean an order is coming any time soon.
Posted by Seth on September 8, 2011 under Flying, frequent flyer, Mileage Run, points |
With the Boeing 787 Dreamliner entering service in the next few weeks I’ve been quite excited about the opportunity to fly on it. Seats on the inaugural flight – from Tokyo to Hong Kong – are being auctioned off for charity and I’m quite certain I don’t have the scratch to make that work. Plus the dates for that flight wouldn’t work in my schedule. But thanks to a great sale fare from Seattle to China I’ve found a way to make it happen at a reasonable price.
The plan moved from the day dreaming phase to potentially real a couple weeks ago when a sale fare popped up between Seattle and Beijing. The timing on that deal was a bit tough – it only worked on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and had a 3-night minimum stay – but I had a few days at the end of October/beginning of November where it could fit in my schedule and the $400ish price tag was hard to complain about. At that point I was pretty much ready to go to China for a few days and wasn’t thinking much about the 787 options.
Then someone mentioned that the fare also permitted a stopover in Tokyo in either direction for only $100 more, Now it was getting interesting. I could get in a trip to China and a stop in Tokyo during the first week the 787 is supposed to be flying. Now the planning started to get interesting. I ticketed the Seattle – Beijing – Tokyo – Seattle flights and then started researching the 787 options.
Yikes!
I really, really, REALLY didn’t expect the fare to be so high. That was definitely putting a wrinkle in this master plan of mine. I found that I could get a one-way award ticket for only 6,000 points on the outbound flight to Hiroshima, saving $400, but the return flight was still full price. That was going to sting.
Fortunately, however, both ANA and JAL offer up Japan Air Pass tickets in conjunction with their alliance partners. These passes allow you to assemble domestic Japan flight segments in conjunction with an international itinerary at a much more reasonable rate. The Star Alliance version prices at ¥10,000 per segment, plus ¥50,000 in taxes per segment. Even better, the ¥50,000 ¥5,000 tax is not paid on any segment which is within 24 hours of the international arrival or departure. Since my total time in Tokyo is barely 40 hours it turns out that both of my domestic segments are within that threshold. All of a sudden I had hope for a quite reasonably priced adventure.
The challenge was not over yet, however. The Japan Air Pass on ANA requires inventory in the M fare bucket. This is a mid-level bucket on ANA so not impossible to find. In fact five of the seven outbound flights had the M bucket as an option for the day I was in town. Of course the one I wanted (the most reasonably timed flight in the morning) did not. Neither did the 787 flight from Haneda to Hiroshima. And for the return segment the Hiroshima to Haneda flight was also missing the appropriate inventory. Back to the drawing board. Sortof.
While considering whether paying the $400 was back to a viable approach for me I also figured that maybe I’d get lucky and that maybe the M inventory would open up. I set up an alert to watch that fare bucket and hoped that the email would come soon. Somewhat to my surprise, it did! A quick call to the folks at United Airlines (the Japan Pass is booked through the airline operating the intercontinental flight) and I had my seats reserved. It was going to take a few days for the rate desk to price it out but the seats were mine.
I called back a few days later as instructed and got the good news. That $800 plane ticket was mine for only $264.40. That’s 66% off. Woo hoo!
Sure, there is always the chance of an aircraft swap. And the day starts WAY too early so that I can also spend a few hours touristing about in Hiroshima. But overall I’m incredibly excited about the opportunity and about the price point at which I got everything put together. I’m also impressed that I finally found one of the regional passes where the fare makes sense. I guess there is a first time for everything.
A special thanks to the friends who suggested looking in to the Japan Air Pass option. Most excellent advice indeed.
Tags: 787, ANA, award, Beijing, Boeing, China, Dream2011, Dreamliner, frequent flyer, Hiroshima, Hong Kong, JAL, Japan, points
Posted by Seth on April 26, 2011 under Hotel, points, Review |
Hong Kong can be an incredibly expensive destination to visit. It can also be incredibly affordable. The key is finding a good balance of quality and price, particularly in lodgings. It turns out that with a little digging it can be done, though probably not where you would expect to find it.
The western branded chains all have properties available but, well, they really don’t do much for me. I’ve stayed in the Renaissance when the price was right (and the location certainly was right!) but the regular rates they ask are 2-3x what I’m generally looking to pay for a night. Then there are the Chunking Mansions. More or less glorified hostels (some not so glorified) these are low-rent and low-class. They work, but dealing with finding the correct property once in there can be a challenge and I’m rarely up for fighting to find my hotel after a long flight.
Get rid of both those categories and what’s left are the mid-range, mid-priced properties that suit me just fine. Priced at roughly USD $70-90/night they fit my budget quite nicely and there is at least one local chain that manages to do it with a bit of style, too. My last time through town I stayed at Mingle on the Wing. This time I stayed at Mingle at the Eden. They call themselves "boutique" which is likely just code for "small rooms" but it works at these properties, at least for me.
The rooms are simple (and certainly not spacious) but they are also clean. They include free internet (while the more expensive hotels charge for it) and generally just make it a reasonable stay experience. They are situated a 5 minute walk (a bit more if, like me, you get lost trying to leave the train station) from the Central train station, making for a quick commute to and from the airport or to just about anywhere in town on the metro system. Also a short walk away is the Lan Kwai Fong area, with plenty of bars to offer up an evening’s worth of entertainment.
Here are a couple photos from the room taken with my BB (which mostly explains the low quality of the photos).
Like I said, definitely not luxe, but if you’re looking for a clean, reasonably priced room in a good location it is hard to do much better than this in Hong Kong. They’re generally available for booking on hotels.com where you can get credits in their Welcome Rewards program so you’re not fully forgoing any point earning. Also try shopping them at wotif.com where the prices and inventory seem to be different from time to time.
Posted by Seth on March 28, 2011 under Book Review, Review |
There are three main lessons that I learned from reading Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next:
- Logistics and speed are unstoppable forces that will define the next several generations of economic development globally;
- The United States has already lost most any chance of keeping pace; and,
- The global economy may never actually cash in on the investments it is making.
The first of these observations is not particularly surprising and the conclusions there are pretty reasonable. The second and third scare me to no end. Indeed, reading a couple steps down the line in the global economic environment laid bare in Aerotropolis, it is quite easy to see the whole system collapsing on itself in a matter of years, assuming we make it that far. That small bits have already experienced such a decline is of little comfort.
The premise of the areotropolis is rather simple. Rather than try to explain it myself I’ll let you understand it in the words of its greatest proponent, John Kasarda through the lens of author Greg Lindsay:
…[R]ather than banish airports to the edge of town and then do our best to avoid them, we will build this century’s cities around them. Why? Because people once chose to live in cities for the wealth of connections they offered socially, financially, intellectually, and so forth. But in the era of globalization we choose cities drawing closer together themselves, linked by fiber-optic cables and jet aircraft.
…
In essence, the aerotropolis of [Kasarda’s]imagination isn’t necessarily a city but a superconductor, a piece of infrastructure promising zero resistance to anyone wanting to set up shop there. Examine [Kasarda’s] initial sketches for one – with the carefully arranged waves of white boxes and office cubes – and you’ll find a city expressly planned on behalf of the companies expected to populate it. An aerotropolis isn’t an airport either, and building one isn’t a matter of having the longest runways or the largest landmass. Frictionlessness is the product of a whole host of attributes, many of which are invisible: tariff-free trade zones, faster customs clearance, fewer and faster permits, and a right-to-work workforce that knows what it’s doing. ‘It’s the way you reduce time, the way you reduce costs, the way you reduce space,’ Kasarda says. ‘The aerotropolis is where the elastic mile, the friction of space, community without propinquity, and trade routes all come together.’
…
[A] third of the value of all the goods made in the world, three trillions dollars’ worth, travels by air while composing barely 1 percent of their weight. Air cargo’s growth outpaced world trade’s by a factor of four-to-one over the last thirty-five years, and blew past global GDP growth by nine-to-one, meaning more and more of what’s worth making and moving (including half of American exports) is aloft. In the Instant age, Kasarda says, ‘The price of oil matters less than the price of speed.’
Building an aerotropolis is a relatively easy thing to do, assuming no political or environmental concerns. Find a plot of land, clear it out and build a world-class airport in the middle. From there, add on industrial, commercial and residential bits in the appropriate ratios and then watch as industry beats down the doors to show up and open shop inside your free-trade zone. Free of tariffs and , in many cases, free of local laws, these aerotropolii represent the free market economy at its most basic level.
The problems that arise are, of course, plentiful. Starting with the political and environmental concerns, there are plenty of reasons for many in the western world to object to such developments. Still, looking at the present evidence, there is no doubt that such developments have been successful. Louisville and Memphis are essentially subsidiaries of UPS and FedEx, respectively. The area surrounding Amsterdam’s Schipol airport is a testimony to the efficacy of global trade and just-in-time delivery of flowers on a scale that is yet to be matched, though Addis Abba is one of several hoping to edge in on that market.
Dulles, Denver and Dallas-Fort Worth are all representative of this not-so-new approach to urban planning. Centralize around a transportation hub, just like ports in the days of yore and train terminals in the not quite so distant past. Today that hub is the airport large enough to easily handle frequent service from Boeing 747F freighters laden with cargo inbound from manufacturing hubs in southeast Asia or agricultural hubs in South America. It is not at all difficult to see how this progression has been made and Lindsay does a phenomenal job of explaining in detail some specific examples of why certain areas have succeeded and other have failed in developing these aerotropolii.
The concept of what makes an aerotropolis is just half the story, however. The economic impact that they can bring to the developing world is the other half, and it scares the hell out of me.
Asia, Africa and the Middle East are the main development targets today. China is in the midst of an unprecedented infrastructure build that is dedicating a tremendous portion of their GDP to highways, high-speed trains and airports. Many of those airports are destined to be aerotropolii. Thailand started a similar effort with Suvarnabhumi, the new international airport in Bangkok. Ho Chi Minh City is doing the same with their new international airport.
In China the development is easy. The local, provincial or national government decrees that an airport will be built on a specific plot of land and that’s the end of the story. It happens – quickly – and those currently there are relocated. In Thailand, however, a similar set of plans resulted in relatives of ministers suddenly operating real estate and logistics operations. When word got out of the coming aerotropolis everyone tried to get in on the deal and real estate prices shot through the roof. The recent coups can be related, in part, to the failure of these plans to get off the ground or the revolt of the people against the abuse of that power.
So there is the risk of political upheaval as the working class feels they’ve been wronged. This potential is more pronounced as those same workers start to profit from the business that the aerotropolii bring in now have the means to afford to protest, rather than to accept whatever they are told to do. And now that the protesters know that the airports are the life-blood of their economies (e.g. the recent Bangkok protests that saw both sides seize airport terminals at various points to stymie the ruling party) the risk is that much more real.
But that isn’t the part that worries me the most. What scares me is the potential for all this investment to be a very efficient and expedient means to spend billions of dollars of someone else’s money in hopes of a return that is impossible to realize. And Lindsay outlines exactly how that will come to pass as the aerotropolii develop and multiply.
There are currently scores of such projects in various stages of development. Can they all possibly be successful? Dubai already almost collapsed once as the highly leveraged construction efforts there saw money and credit dry up in the recent financial crisis.
In effect, Dubai was a giant arbitrage play, a pure experiment in funneling and funding globalization. A tiny city-state with literally nothing – no oil, few people, and little education – sought to become a global capital in a single generation…. That’s why everything was so oversize, including Dubai’s ambitions.
Bangkok failed to move swiftly enough and to avoid corruption, leading to the failure of the aerotropolis there, though not to the collapse of the economy. FedEx has been wooed by China to move their Pacific sort hub from Subic Bay to Baiyun International Airport near Ghangzhou.
First, [the Chinese] drained the pond covering the site – the only reason urban scrubland hasn’t subsumed it already. Then they diverted a river, paved over its marshes, and pumped concrete into caves underneath. FedEx had sought equally drastic changed to China’s legal code, rewriting customs and aviation statutes to grant itself an unlimited number of flights…. True to form, doing so required a year of tortuous negotiations with more than a hundred agencies and bureaucracies. Once given the green light, construction of the six-lane highway linking the hub to the Delta’s factories had taken all of six months.
But what does such a shift mean to Subic Bay? Or to the other local facilities that have been operating as regional cargo hubs? For now, they are struggling to fight back, to find tenants for the space and to keep their economies alive. Why have similar projects in Hanoi or Saigon failed (or not been as rapidly successful)? They can offer cheaper labor, but the total pool of raw materials and labor is still larger in China. So the Vietnamese versions strain to get sufficient traction and businesses in their aerotropolii. But the cost of developing them is already sunk.
But even the shift of FedEx into the airport is no guarantee. There are still other areas desperate for similar growth and they are somewhat ruthless in their pursuit of the business.
As the Hong Kong economist Steven Cheung once explained their attitude, ‘You want a business license? The locality will assign someone to do the walking and talking for you. Want a building permit? They will give you one with money-back guarantees. Unhappy about that dirty creek passing through the site? They may offer to build a small lake for you…. They sell their cheap electricity, sell their parks and entertainment, sell their easy transportation, sell their water supply, sell their glorious history and even sell how good looking their girls are – no exaggeration!’
There are hospitals operating in India that see themselves as the far end of a long-haul commuter healthcare road. Just like the Polish doctors who commute to England to work the weekend shift and are home Monday morning on a cheap flight, these hospitals are luring in patients from abroad with the promise of top-quality healthcare at bargain prices. Infrastructure is being built but there is no guarantee that the Ray Kinsella-styled plan will come through. What if they build it and no one comes?
The danger is that someone else will siphon [patients] away with lower costs and better connectivity in the form of nonstop flights; layovers are not an option when you’ve just come out of traction.
Indeed, Hyderabad is already trying to steal the market from Mumbai and Bangalore. The brand new airport in Hyderabad was built with an eye towards being a Healthport, among other things.
The book highlights tells several other stories, from a man-made city built literally in the middle of the ocean in Korea to the amazing fresh flowers market that is centered in Amsterdam, though showing signs of sprouting in Africa and China. And in each example precious little attention is paid to what happens to the legacy locations as the new sites go up. No book can cover everything, but at least mentioning the potential for billions of dollars of invested funds to end up with no return is a worthwhile acknowledgement to make in my book.
And that’s what ultimately has me scared. Not all of these aerotropolii will be successful. There are simply too many competing to offer the same services in concentrated regional centers. Some will almost certainly succeed and it will provide a boon to the local economy of the winners. Right up until the competitor down the road offers up cheaper, faster and better services a couple years later. Moving the factories is an expensive undertaking, with short-term effects on to the balance sheet of the company in question and with potentially devastating long-term repercussions to the aerotropolis that loses the business.
The book is an interesting read and definitely worth checking out, both from a global economics and a aerophile perspective. And I actually believe that most of the predictions of growth are likely to come true; all current evidence certainly supports them. I just fear for the fallout that comes with those developments and its impact on the global economy. For someone to win big in these efforts someone else is likely to lose badly.
Posted by Seth on March 23, 2011 under Mileage Run, Trip Reports |
As part of the planning for my trip to Hong Kong and Guam this weekend I have finally started to look for some hotel options. In the end I’ll probably stay at the same place I stayed last time; it is a good price and a good location for a decent hotel. But I was curious what other options I have so I did some digging.
Expedia.com was nice enough to present their opaque bidding options to me so I figured I’d take a look. If the border of the neighborhood was reasonable enough Id be happy to save a few dollars and see a new hotel. Somehow, however, I do not think that their map of Kowloon is completely accurate.
That’s right, folks. Apparently Kowloon covers most of North America.
Sorry, Expedia, but with that level of incompetence I won’t be booking with you any time soon.
Posted by Seth on December 13, 2009 under News |
The negotiations of the USA-Japan open skies treaty have been ongoing for quite a while now. This latest round of talks, held last week, was actually extended by a day to allow for the final details to be ironed out since they were so close. And ultimately the deal that they struck seems to be a very fair and very good one for the airlines and for customers.
Tokyo Service
With the exception of Tokyo all destinations in Japan are now accessible with unlimited frequencies by all American and Japanese carriers. That is a significant step forward. The Tokyo market, however, is key to pretty much all service to Japan and the agreements reached on that front are quite interesting. Both airports – Haneda and Narita – will remain slot controlled due to the significant demand for service to those airports. And the number of slots that US-based carriers have at Narita will actually decrease a tiny bit. But there’s a good reason for that.
Tokyo’s Haneda airport – the more convenient and desirable destination for most passengers headed to Tokyo – is opening up to more international flights starting in 2010. Some of those flights will be potentially operated to the United States under this deal with as many as four daily flights permitted. That is going to be a very significant benefit for whichever carrier manages to secure those slots. There are a number of restrictions on the new Haneda slots, including late night departure times which aren’t particularly ideal. But it is better than nothing.
Anti-trust Immunity
There are some other interesting nuggets that came out of the agreement as well. Anti-trust immunity (ATI) will be permitted on the US-Japan routes for the first time ever. While there will still be specific applications required for such operations the ATIs will permit coordination of schedules, service and fares for partner carriers on routes between the two countries. The Star Alliance carriers of ANA, Continental and United Airlines are best position to take advantage of the ATI opportunities and they’ve already announced their intentions to do so. The three carriers expect to be able to better coordinate their offerings and streamline operations. In addition to the Star Alliance three, JAL will likely take advantage of the ATI opportunities once they figure out which suitor they’re going to dance with in the bankruptcy/bailout recovery effort. Both Delta and American Airlines are still pursuing the carrier aggressively and being able to apply ATI policies to the operations following whatever deal might be reached will be rather beneficial to whichever partnership comes out of that deal.
Extra Freedoms
Finally, both countries will be removing restrictions on fifth freedom routes. Fifth freedom flights are some of my favorites because the routes seem strange when viewed out of context. They are flights operated between two countries, neither of which the airline is based in, where the airline is permitted to sell seats only on that route. There are a number of such flight in Asia particularly, such as Air France flying between Bangkok and Hanoi or Ho Chi Minh City. And there are a few in the USA, like Cathay flying from Vancouver to New York City’s JFK airport. As part of this agreement fifth freedom flights will the permitted without restriction by Japan or the United States. This is great for carriers that want to grow their route maps onward from Japan or the USA. These “add-on” segments generally help to make flights that might otherwise not be profitable happen, so there is an increase in service between markets. Plus there is the opportunity to grab the “other” flight generally rather cheap and have some fun flying on different carriers.
The loser on this bit is most likely Delta which acquired a number of route authorities ex-Tokyo when they bought Northwest Airlines recently. That purchase gave them a number of slots and authorities from Tokyo and now all the other carriers who desire such will be able to get in the game on those flights, assuming they can find the slots. Also, the third country will still need to approve the fifth freedom flights so it isn’t completely open, but there are many more opportunities now for many more carriers.
Mostly good, but potential gotchas
Overall, agreements such as this are generally a good thing for passengers. The increased opportunities for carriers to provide service generally means that where they think there is a market airlines will try, at a lower cost than if they had to buy route authorities to provide such service. The ATIs are always a bit of a toss-up as they essentially permit collusion and price-fixing between partners. As long as there are enough non-partnered carriers in a market that generally isn’t a problem but it is something that always causes a bit of apprehension as it can lead to higher prices due to less competition. Still, there’s a lot of potential good news out of this agreement. Now we just wait to see how it actually plays out.
Posted by Seth on August 24, 2009 under Uncategorized |
I love postcards. Really, really, really love them. I love sending them and I love receiving them. Sadly, however, it seems to be a dying art.
I seem to be alone (or in a rapidly shrinking population) in my love for the post card. They seem to still be readily available in some places but impossible to find in others. In Norway we were able to find (rather expensive) cards in the over-touristed town of Geiranger but stamps were another endeavor entirely. The hotels all simply have postage meters now rather than real stamps. The card will arrive just the same but it isn’t as much fun.
In Hong Kong I actually struggled to even find post cards. I asked at several hotels and looked in the various stores I passed as I wandered the island. None had cards. Once I finally found cards there was the next adventure – finding stamps. It wasn’t quite as difficult as in Norway, but it certainly wasn’t simple. Fortunately the cards all found their way to the intended recipients.
In India we had quite the adventure getting our post cards home. The post offices there are quite efficient normally and we actually weren’t too troubled with lines or even figuring out how much postage we needed to add to the cards. But the stamps apparently had no glue on the back of them like we’ve come to expect. We did our best with saliva and I’m honestly not sure how they actually made it back to all our friends, but they did. And we came out of it with a great story of wandering Goa and licking (and re-licking) stamps for a couple hours to get them on the way.
One of the current iPhone commercials these days is showing off their “app for that” for sending postcards. They have a picture of Paris and some “wish you were here” text and the person taps and it is sent. That just isn’t the same. Sure, at least one of those services (shootIt!) actually prints and sends a physical post card, not just something electronic, but you don’t get the fun of the random stamp, trying to figure out how much postage you need, the cool postmark from a foreign land and the anticipation of waiting for the cards to arrive at their destination. The fact that postcards generally arrive well after the trip is over actually adds to the fun for me.
There was also the discussion we had with the others in our group as we were on the fjords in Norway. Someone mentioned something about simply sending a text or SMS message when they’re abroad. There’s no sense of place from such an action. I’m not a fan at all.
I’m a huge fan of many things digital. I live online in many ways, both for work and leisure. But when it comes to travel there is still one bit that I’m happy to keep offline: my postcards.
Want to receive a random post card from somewhere around the world? No guarantees, but drop me a line and I’ll see what I can wrangle.
Posted by Seth on March 29, 2009 under Uncategorized |
First a loud bang, followed by a bright flash out of the corner of my eye, over by the window. Then another one. Not really what I was expecting sitting in the hotel room this evening while enjoying a bit of a siesta and getting ready to head out to dinner. So the wise-assed comment slipped out. The good news is that they certainly were not. It was an impromptu fireworks show, right outside our window. So I grabbed my camera and held down the shutter button:
The five minute long flurry was actually pretty impressive. Nothing close to the Hong Kong New Year celebration or a typical NYC show, but considering the fact that they were launched by some guy standing on the median in the middle of the road outside our hotel while traffic was still flowing normally and that they didn’t get up much higher than 100 feet in the air, a pretty good show. Certainly better than anything else I was expecting to see tonight.
Posted by Seth on April 8, 2008 under Uncategorized |
Oasis, the Hong Kong-based carrier that took on Cathay Pacific and British Airways on routes to London and Vancouver, is reportedly closing up shop today. It is already well into tomorrow in Hong Kong and the inbound flights appear to still be operating and the outbounds are still scheduled rather than cancelled at this point, but the rumors are running pretty strong that the end has come.
I’m really trying not to focus on all the bad in the airline industry these days, but when that’s all that is out there, it is hard not to…
UPDATE (4.9 8:33a EDT): It is official now. At least Oasis has rumblings of someone wanting to buy their assets to gain a foothold into the Hong Kong airline biz, but who knows if that really means anything at this point.
Posted by Seth on March 27, 2008 under News |
A slightly surreal experience yesterday evening reminded me just how important it is to remember that we are really all in a global community now, not insular and isolated. And I didn’t even have to leave the island of Manhattan for this “trip.”
Standing in a deli on 68th & Broadway, waiting for my sandwich to be heated up, I overheard an older woman (typical stereotype – hunched over on the cane, barely able to speak loud enough to be heard, etc.) try to order a bit of provolone cheese to go. She didn’t want a sandwich or anything, just some cheese. The guy behind the counter wasn’t sure how much to charge, so he asked another guy, who asked another. None of them knew. Eventually one of them called out to the boss to ask what the price should be. The boss answered and all was well, or so I thought. See, the entirety of that conversation happened in Spanish, and the woman ordering her salad at the station between the boss and me was NOT happy about it.
This woman starts to lecture the boss about how he needed to speak English because the employees needed to learn English and how no one ever spoke to her immigrant parents in Croatian when they came over. She carried on for a couple minutes, while the boss was rather amused and kept brushing her off. He finished the conversation with a comment about freedom of speech and walked away from her, back behind the counter. I was still waiting on my sandwich and he saw me standing there and asked if I needed anything. I replied that I was all set and that I appreciated the free entertainment while I was waiting, to which we shared a calming smile.
All of the guys working there speak English. They all clearly knew what was going on, and they were rather shocked that this lady was so arrogant about the issue. I, too, was shocked that she was so caught up in the issue. I was tempted to offer to hail a cab for her to get her back to the airport to go somewhere she’d be more comfortable, but for some reason discretion seemed more appropriate at that point (which is strange for me) and I just let it go.
Looking back on it, I think of the various trips I’ve taken where language was an issue. There was the driver in Ecuador who spoke almost no English, and I speak almost no Spanish (at least not correctly) and yet we still managed to get by for an hour or so talking about his family and mine and our vacation and the things we’d seen and the plans for the rest of the trip. There was my trip to Hong Kong where there was plenty of English spoken, but this guy at the butcher shop didn’t speak any and I have no Mandarin or Cantonese (and couldn’t begin to guess which one he was speaking), but we managed to negotiate an arrangement that had me pay for taking some pictures of him and him not attack me with his large knife.
Moral of the story is that there are a lot of people out there who aren’t the same as you. And they probably don’t want to be the same as you. That’s what makes travelling to experience their cultures so enjoyable. Remember that when you’re on the road, and life will flow much more smoothly. Or you can be the obnoxious woman in the deli that no one wants to deal with.
Posted by Seth on February 13, 2008 under Trip Reports |
I love watching a city at night. The glow of the buildings always has a somewhat eerie quality to me, knowing that they are functional by day and artistic by night. Hong Kong is no exception; it is possibly one of the greatest cities to view at night, with a bunch of buildings lit up, a harbor in the middle with views from both sides and a light show every night.
Throw the Chinese New Year into the mix and you also get a phenomenal fireworks show to add to the fun. The 22 minute show featured 8 “acts,” all set to music. Some of the shells were “special,” showing the character for the olympics or a horse, representing the 2008 olympics and the equestrian events that will be hosted in Hong Kong later this year. They also had a bunch of “8″ shells, a lucky number in Chinese. Regardless of which shells they were, the skyline illuminated by the fireworks was an impressive sight.
I got out on the waterfront promenade at 4pm for an 8pm show, and it was already crowded. And the fact that it was the coldest New Year celebration in 12 years didn’t make it all that comfortable waiting the four hours for the show to start. But it was definitely worth it. I took 300+ pictures in the 22 minutes. These are some of the good ones, with more here.
This one is my new desktop wallpaper. Click on it (or any of the others) to get a larger version.
