To remind me of what I am missing, while I spend each day in one of the dullest cities in the world!
However, Spike channeled Friedman to remind again why I miss Asia.
It actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend’s Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.
Landing at Kennedy Airport from Hong Kong was, as I’ve argued before, like going from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. The ugly, low-ceilinged arrival hall was cramped, and using a luggage cart cost $3. (Couldn’t we at least supply foreign visitors with a free luggage cart, like other major airports in the world?) As I looked around at this dingy room, it reminded of somewhere I had been before. Then I remembered: It was the luggage hall in the old Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport. It closed in 1998.
The next day I went to Penn Station, where the escalators down to the tracks are so narrow that they seem to have been designed before suitcases were invented. The disgusting track-side platforms apparently have not been cleaned since World War II. I took the Acela, America’s sorry excuse for a bullet train, from New York to Washington. Along the way, I tried to use my cellphone to conduct an interview and my conversation was interrupted by three dropped calls within one 15-minute span.
All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out — that’s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.”
I always want to recall the first time I ever went to Hong Kong. No lie, I was in the bar of my hotel exactly 1 hour and five minutes after exiting the door of the plane. Quick customs, luggage, and straight to the train to Kolwoon. Cell phone worked as advertised, everything I need to see was within easy walking or riding distance, subway worked well and taxis were affordable.
As Spike notes, “it’s all these little things that you get so used to, that you start to take for granted, and then you go back to the US on a trip and the absence of them is right there, shoved into your face, and you wonder why you put up with it if you’re lucky enough (as I am) to have a choice.”
I’ve got to get that choice back.
People back here in the land of fat people shopping malls and too many cars, get all spooled up when guys like me say that. They will inevitably point to street after street of nice little McMansions and ask me, ” how can I say that?”.
Because I don’t need a McMansion-and neither do you.
Just give me a decent apartment, a charged up subway card, and decent selection of night life that I don’t have to risk arrest and losing my license to be able to go to and have a good time at. ( No designated driver lectures are needed either-they don’t help you when you want to go out booming by your self.).
Which brings me back to spread out Hicksville.
Today was one of those days at work that I could have done without. The organization I am working with is going through a lot of “change” right now. A project we had been let lying dormant for good reason-has now been forcibly resurrected and given an unreasonable deadline. Add to that we’ve got folks coming down next week who need to be taken care of.
No wonder I miss the days of going here. Drinking these:
And admiring these:
It will be the same next week………………………………..