And more precisely a 5-day visa on the spot at Lowu/Luohu.

Non es possible, señor. Unless you have a valid HK ID card. If you don’t you get bounced back to HK, and it is a painfully long process. I should know, I just went through that process.

Apparently the only place where you can get a Chinese visa as a, ahem, tourist, in HK is:

Office of the Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region
外交部駐香港特派員公署領事部外國人簽證處
7/F, Lower Block, China Resources Building, 26 Harbour Road, Wanchai, Hong Kong (Department of Consular Affairs) (CA)
香港灣仔區港灣道26號華潤大廈低座7樓
Tel: 3413 2424
Email: fmco_hk@mfa.gov.cn
Website: http://www.fmcoprc.gov.hk/eng/
Office hours: 9/12 - 14/17, Monday to Friday.

Sucks. Greatly. I’ll try on Monday to get a friggin’ 2-entry visa. Will update this post accordingly.

Skee, I suppose for Ski. This Olympic 2008 fever promises a nice harvest of ChinChongChenglish.

I tried to call Air France HK today, at 5.01 pm — New Year’s Eve, Chinese version — and after navigating through a trilingual menu, ended up on a recorded message saying “Sorry, our
offices are open from 9 am to 6 pm. If you need yada yada, web site yada yada.

Dude. It’s 5 pm, and your office closes at 6, and you’ve already left for the day? That little civil-servant culture of working as little as possible has apparently reached the shores of China…

Blech.

Here a couple of queries that led to this site.

• duck tape uses children
• frenchmen reputation
• titshits
• clean and organized
• 獻花歌

All in a day’s work…

I rarely used out of office email alerts before, since when I received an email it could either wait, or I’d take care of it promptly, regardless of where I was. But with the company I am working for now, it is good to have this function, since it enables me to notify HQ when I am not available to them, or in which country I am, without having to email a hundred people. And since I travel on a weekly basis, it is good. However, the service provider we use is quirky at best, and when I include myself to the list of recipients, I get a copy of the alert — or more than one if I email myself several times. Bleh.

However, this is not the worst. I received today one of those alerts and was surprised by a very bad typo. I may not be native in English, but unless I am very tired, or drunk, and even then, I usually don’t misspell or make obvious grammar mistakes. So I was very surprised to see this:

Hello Earth? Could we get back to Squirrel Mail [blech!] and fix that, like now? So off I went, and look at that: It IS correctly spelled in the original version…

The Sentence underlined in blue reads Changes are not updated automatically. They have to be validated by customer support. Which needs that somebody at our provider reads — and apparently feels quite happy to correct fuck up alerts just because he thinks he’s right! This web interface we have is not UTF-8 by the way, but Latin-1 or whatever, which means that when I type non-latin characters, they get foobared too. Merci la France!