I’ve departed from Brooklyn to Hong Kong. My intention is to find scene shops in China to build sets for the US and Euro market. I bought a ticket on NW for about $800. I really have to get my frequent flyer thing going because I’ve lost so many flights by ignoring the whole thing over the years. The flight turned out to be a code share with Delta. Jane says that they have merged. We first flew to Tokyo. That was about a 14 hour flight. It’s really a bear to sit still for that amount of time. you can get a full night’s sleep and still have 6 hours to kill. I saw a couple of movies. I tried to watch Ice Age 2 (or whatever number their up to) but didn’t last very long. Then I watched a Will Ferrel movie with Dinosaurs. I wasn’t good, but it was exactly what you’d expect. The I watched some movie with a bunch of explosions. I can’t remember what. You can actually feel your internal clock being fucked with as you fly. We took off at about 12 noon and flew in a straight line to Tokyo which on the globe goes almost to the arctic circle. It starts to get dark around 3pm (home time) then the sun comes back up again at around 9pm, It was dark again by the time we landed which was 4am(ish) at home and 4pm in Tokyo. In Tokyo I had a fairly short layover. I sat right in front of the gate in case I fell asleep. The flight from Tokyo to HK is about 5 hours. I think I watched another movie on that one but obviously it was unmemorable. When we landed I had no problem with immigration. I took the MTR train into Hong Kong Central for about US$12 and then a cab to the hotel for about the same. My online reservation was honored without question (whew) and they upgraded me to the business club floor. The room was not non-smoking (the unavailability of non smoking rooms the ostensible reason for the upgrade) but it wasn’t too stinky and by the next day it had aired out. The room was a pretty standard business hotel kind of room except that it had a very small kitchenette with a deep kitchen sink (with a cutting board kind of cover) two burner stove a microwave, hot water boiler and a large refrigerator. All crammed into a not overly large entry hallway. Across the street was a 7-11 open late. I was able to score a couple of beer and some munchies. I sat and checked out the TV and the chilled. It took a while for me to get to sleep and by that time I had drunk quite a bit of beer. The next morning I woke up pretty early. I felt like crap. They are right, one definitely shouldn’t drink in any significant quantity on a super huge flight. It was like low grade hangover with fluish symptoms. I have to avoid that in the future. Especially since that night i went to see a performance on CCdC and afterwards went out and drank with Anther. We went to a bar near the CCdC studios. There they brought beer buckets of something called Blue Girl. It was very very light, just like I like beer but with an alcahol content of 5%. The bottle had a kind of Bavarian theme. There were several waitresses who contstantly circulated and kept our glasses from getting empty. We must have drunk about 6 beers each. It was Anther’s birthday, but the people at the bar (who were obviously very close to him) didn’t know it. After the bar made a big to do about another patron’s birthday I mentioned to the manager that it was Anther’s birthday as well. After that they moved us to a better table and then all the waitresses came by and sat with us for a while. We played a fun dice game that Anther says is played all over China. There are 5 die in a cup. You shake the cup, put it upside down on the table then take a look at your roll.