A coupla idle thoughts on young parents these days:

• I saw a baby who couldn’t be older than twelve months with both ears pierced. Parents were very young, and looked quite out of place at Incheon International Airport. On the other hand, they woulda fit perfectly in a trailer park. Yup, as in white trailer trash. The numerous round-shaped burn marks on the father’s arms were kinda dodgy too…
• I saw a baby that couldn’t be older than 2 years sleeping – or at least trying to – on his young mother’s shoulder, in a very noisy, smoke-filled locale in Hong Kong. Apparently the parents couldn’t have their Friday evening fun denied for something as inconsequential as a baby and no baby-sitter. Or something. That couple looked and sounded like the middle-class, pub-addicted Brits they prolly were.

Maybe I am just an old fart, as open-minded and tolerant as a rhino with a bad case of piles. I still think something’s wrong here…

Growl helps. Growl is a free universal notification system for Mac OS X. It’s like the little bubbles over the notification area on a Windows XP task bar, but on steroids.

in Adium: One less reason to run Parallels

Steroids. Chuckle. Make that LSD. Growl is one of the reasons I almost dropped Adium altogether – I seem to remember the coding teams of both apps overlap. Growl was driving me nuts on my former laptop, a first generation TiBook 17″, which I replaced a few weeks ago with a MacBook. Even disabling Growl didn;t work, the bloody thing would get re-enabled seemingly on its own – I suspect either some buggy code or some Windows-like “I won’t take no for an answer” behaviour in their code. Anyway, yeah Windows XP bubbles galore on LSD… Seriously.

So when I installed Adium this time, I made sure Growl wasn’t installed, at all, and I had to tell Adium a coupla times that no, I didn’t want to “enjoy” that marvelous feature – again that “I won’t take no for an answer” behaviour at work I suppose…

This is my Shenzhen kit: a set of immigrations to [bottom to top] enter China, leave China, and enter Hong Kong – that plus my passport and 6-month, multiple entry visa, of course… Costs a bit of money but enables you to save a lot of time and pages in you passport, as a single entry, 5-day visa is, like in Indonesia, a full-page sticker anyway…

You see, Shenzhen is just a stone’s throw away from Hong Kong, literally. Look at this map, you see the “Lowu Station” sign at the bottom? That’s the end station of the KCR East line, that goes from Tsim Sha Tsui to the border. There are two bridges, the one on the right is the one for pedestrians. You exit HK through the station terminal, cross the bridge – and set your mobile phone to roaming; whenever you see people back up on that bridge, you know they have realized they forgot to set it to roaming/call divert, and they go back within their HK mobile provider’s range – and enter China at the terminal just north of the bridge. Hong Kong residents just go through a metro-like gate with their chip-enabled ID. Us fuhreenas, it’s a little more complex. So to save time, I always prepare all forms in advance, which is this much time saved in lines… When leaving Shenzhen, you also need to present a form, which is a bit odd, but whatever, they be the Boss™, and the line can be long. So whenever I leave Shenzhen, I stock up on these cards too. Next is HK, where again the line can be long, albeit shorter than the one for Mainland “cousins”… I have even seen once a Hong Kong couple with foreign passports who apparently go back and forth all the time: they asked the immigration officer for a bunch of forms!
The last ingredient in the kit, not apparent here, is a wad of Chinese yuan, usually procured via friends in Shenzhen who need HK$. This is usually stored in my cross-Asian travel kit, where I have anywhere from 5 to 10 currencies.

So every time I go to Shenzhen from Hong Kong, I get 5 stamps, which tends to consume passport pages at a terrifying rate: one for leaving HK, one each for entering and leaving SZ, and two for entering HK [entry stamp plus entry status and length/ Visitor:90 days]. This will change when I get a resident visa, hopefully…

If you’re at Incheon Internacional Aeroportul and are looking for a wireless connection, go to the Korean Air Business Class Lounge – the wifi is very strong and you might be able to pick up a signal. The network used to be open, but since they wisened up. Select kalpr1 or kalpr2, the WEP key is

2e5d0e2d68

.

In other news I am on my way back to Bordeaux, after a pair of weeks in HK, and a week in Seoul. Business looks promising – finally! – and I might even keep my current job!