One Night in Hong Kong

That's all that's between me and and getting to rest in my own bed. I have flight from Hong Kong to Chicago in the morning, and then from Chicago to San Francisco, a bit circular, but it was the only flight available. On the plus side, I was able to get an upgrade to business class, the first one in a year of international traveling that I've done for work.

The meetings in Beijing were uneventful, and I did get to meet up with my "nephew", Zhenning. He brought me local peaches and cherries. My nephew is graduating in 20 days, and is hard at work on his final design project. He's lined up work at a local Chinese company for now. Congratulations Zhenning.

Spending all this time in Beijing makes me realize both how good and how bad my Mandarin Chinese is. Certain words flow out of my mouth without thinking, partly a condition of having been in China/Taiwan all week. For example, an airport checkstation guard informed me that I needed purchase the airport tax before entering, and without a second thought, I asked her in Mandarin, "where do i purchase it?" At the same time, I've had conversations with many people, where I've lost understanding of the conversation not 30 seconds later, since the vocabulary has me stumped. Parts of it are still ingrained from childhood, unfortunately the rest must all be learned.

I have to admit I did surprise myself a bit this week. I've always had difficulty carrying on conversations in Taiwanese with anyone else except my mother, and I held an entire meeting in Taiwanese this trip with computer technologists. I also kept up with Mandarin more than I expected to. Wan-An.