Leaving on a Jet Plane

For everybody who asked throughout January and February, "Are you packed yet," no, we weren't. But fortunately I started practicing unemployment ahead of schedule and I had ample time to procrastinate. There is no more appropriate opportunity to pull an all-nighter than the night before movers arrive to pack up your life. With last minute energy, we got it done, and I'm proud to say that the remains of the house were not left in a shambles (any more than when were living in it). Due to an unexpected and inexplicable iTunes mishap, I also loaded 110 CDs onto the iMac in a 24 hour period. I removed the last one as one of the movers said, "Can we pack this now?"

We sold the cars within days of leaving. No wheels for two years.

As for wings, the flight process went very smoothly. We stayed at the Hyatt in Jersey city for two nights since the bed and other important things were on their way to shipping containers. We had our last meal at Denino's Friday night. Is anybody surprised? (If only Ralph's was open) Then we got our last glimpse of NYC on the way to JKF in darkness early Saturday morning.

If you ever have the opportunity to fly business class on Cathay Pacific Airlines, I highly recommend it. First we enjoyed some pre-flight snacks in the lounge while resting on actual lounge chairs. This is all new to me as a previous lifetime coach passenger. So I may sound like an excited kid, and I was. Paul has flown in the fancy seats before thanks to his employer. On the last two flights we took together, we sat in the emergency exit row in which the seats do not recline. So I was dazzled to see privately contained seats that reclined into beds. The iPod never left the bag as there was a pretty good selection of digital music that you could listen to with Sony noise reduction headphones. We each watched American Gangster, Juno, and No Country for Old Men on our personal viewing screens. Tasty meals, snacks, wine. That was the easiest 15.5 hours of our lives. We could have endured a couple more.

The exhaustion set in once we hit the city. It's an easy train ride from the airport - one of those efficient things that makes you wonder why nothing is that simple in NYC. We are currently staying at a place called Hanlun Habitats. It's a serviced apartment, so it means I don't have to houseclean... yet. It's in a nice location and the people are very cordial. It is close to the area of Soho, so we quickly found restaurants. We just couldn't really stay awake through our meals for about a week. It still feels a little like vacation, even for the one of us who goes to work, because we're still exploring. I think we've mostly managed to switch day with night by now. It's a twelve hour difference (with the U.S. in daylight savings time).

Before I move on to the Hong Kong stuff, we just want to let people know that we're thankful for all the well wishes and send-off dinners and drinks and gatherings orchestrated by coworkers, friends, families. That's really why we couldn't get any packing done. We were weighed down by goodbye food.