It’s an exciting place, I’ve got to give it that. In the right mood I enjoy surfing the crowds in Mongkok or Central. In the wrong mood I nearly split my teeth gritting them to endure it. I’ve been in the wrong mood a little more often than the right one since I’ve been here. But I have caught some pretty good human waves on occasion.
There’s a lot of new buildings, built on a lot of newly reclaimed land. You’d think that sooner or later vacancy rates would start rising, but they never seem to. Hong Kong works on the assumption that “if we build it, they will come.” And so far the place has been right about that.
Other than maybe the new Disneyland. I hear it’s not doing so well, at least initially. (Although, yesterday I was nearly trampled by a mob of Mickey Mouse ear-sporting Mainland tourists on a rampage through a super-glitzy new shopping mall.) But then, if what someone is looking for is brand name, pre-packaged faux culture and amusement, it’s awfully hard to compete with Hong Kong itself.
One of the things I didn’t like about living here is that the launch of a new designer wristwatch is (mis)taken for a cultural event. The introduction of a new-style Rolls Royce is the Hong Kong equivalent of one of those blockbuster art museum shows – like the greatest hits of Van Gogh.
Who needs art when the city itself is one giant conceptual work in progress. It’s a strange place. It’s solid. All those buildings and crowds are not figments of anybody’s imagination. But increasingly, Hong Kong is more of an idea than a reality. And to me, it’s beginning to feel dated.
Nothing much is actually manufactured here anymore, it’s too expensive. As a trading hub it’s beginning to decline as Chinese companies can increasingly ship directly to the rest of the world rather than transshipping through Hong Kong. As a financial center? Who cares? Nowadays most financial wheeling and dealing take place on an intangible cyber-plane, it doesn't require a geographic location. Hong Kong always had a bigger reputation than it deserved for finance anyhow. It has certainly never been a center of innovative economics. To the local tycoons, everything really boils down to property deals.
Economically Hong Kong is one huge shopping mall in which nearly everyone sells stuff to everyone else. The guy who runs the Rolex shop sells watches to the guy who runs the Guy Laroche shop next door who sells his clothes to the watch guy. It’s not unlike the Eskimo potlatches I studied in college anthropology class. Everyone brings everything they’ve got to the party and then they trade it to each other. Here they use money to facilitate the exchanges, but it’s pretty much the same thing.
That’s worked great for years. When China and the world required Hong Kong’s services as a port; when the region’s most important stock exchange needed a trading floor; and further back in time when you could still make cheap t-shirts and running shoes in the New Territories; Hong Kong’s economy kept expanding. Tourism pumped more money into the place, especially as China began to open up and Hong Kong was its gateway. But in the world that is rapidly developing, is that sustainable?
My guess is no. In 1992 I wrote a long cover story that nearly got me fired from my job as deputy editor of Asian Business magazine – and was never published. It was an attempt to gaze into the crystal ball and catch a glimpse of China and Hong Kong in the year 2010. In it, I predicted that by then Hong Kong would be just another big city in China, replaced on the world stage by Shanghai. It would certainly not be “Asia’s World City,” as the civic boosters here are currently trying to promote. I still believe that. I don’t think it’s going to happen in the next four years, but I’d bet on it happening by 2020.
For the time being, it’s still a very good place to tie one on. Last night I met an old pal at a new bar in a new shopping mall in Hong Kong’s newest, tallest building – the International Finance Center – which is, of course, built on newly “reclaimed” land that has obstructed the view of the buildings that came before it on then newly reclaimed land that is now quite a ways inland. (What is it with “reclaiming” land anyhow? Newly “created” land is more like it. So far as anyone knows the harbor never was dry.)
The bar is called Red and to get to it you enter through the Pure Fitness Club. At the top of the stairs you can turn left, change into your designer gym clothes and work out. Or you can turn right and pay exorbitant prices for cocktails in a truly beautiful bar with a great outdoor patio space.
I met Dave in the bar. Many overpriced single malt whiskys were downed. I recall having done a lot of that when I lived here. Inebriation seems to be the natural state of many, if not most, expatriates in Asia after work. We had a great time talking and catching up. I heard numerous unrepeatable tales of corruption, crime, greed, sex and violence in the course of Dave’s simply conducting his business in China. It was a good evening. My liver, however, is very pleased that I now live in California.
Tuesday, March 7, 2006
Sunday, March 5, 2006
First impressions after an absence and a communist takeover
Hong Kong & Macau - 06 March 2006
It’s dirtier, a whole lot dirtier. It’s noisier than I recall and I remember it as the noisiest place I’ve ever been. It’s more crowded than ever and it was always the most crowded place I’d ever been. And, strangely, if you think ideologically rather than realistically, it is more nakedly, aggressively, greedily capitalist than ever. The people of Hong Kong, never shy about turning a buck, have ramped it up to yet more awe-inspiring heights than ever. Perhaps they’ve been egged on by the supposed quote from that great Chinese Communist leader, Deng Xiaoping: “To get rich is glorious.”
I lived here for 11 years and left one week after the “handover” back to China in 1997. I was last here in 2000. Then, the place seemed sort of depressed, not so sure of itself or where it was going. In spite of British colonialism it has always been a chinese city, but it didn’t seem quite so sure how it was going to do as a Chinese city. It seems to be doing fine, sort of.
There are a few, not so little, problems.
Before the handover the Chinese government promised; or was it that they implied; or was it simply an outright convenient lie that Hong Kong would have a democratically elected government before too long, maybe even as soon as seven or so years after 1997. That hasn’t happened, nor, to be honest, should anyone in their right mind really have expected it to. But there are plenty of people here who are not happy about that, who feel betrayed. There are plenty of others who seem to have the attitude of: ‘get over it, you’re making money aren’t you?’
The air quality here, while not so bad as the other eight Chinese cities that are among the world’s ten worst, is truly awful. And I know bad air when I breathe it. I grew up in Los Angeles when it had the world’s worst air. A lot of the bad air is blown on the prevailing southerly winds down the Pearl River from the north. There’s a whole lot of filthy factories up there. But Hong Kong’s contributing plenty of its own feculence to the stew. China, and by extension Hong Kong, actually has some of the world’s most advanced environmental regulations. Its auto emission standards are much stricter than the U.S. But enforcement is another matter. I’ve had a sinus headache since I arrived. I’m on a couple of Drixoral and regular fistfuls of aspirin daily and I’m managing it to within bearable parameters – just. Maybe if I lived here again for awhile I’d adjust. Maybe not.
One of the joys of living here when I did was that the territory has some of the world’s greatest transportation infrastructure. It still does. It’s fast, efficient and relatively cheap. But I’m getting the impression it’s verging on overwhelmed. When I lived in Hong Kong the population was around six million. It’s something around eight million now. And the place isn’t any bigger – well, other than all the newly reclaimed land in the shrinking harbor, but that’s all offices. So, traffic is a lot worse than it was. The subway, buses, trams, minibuses and ferries are much more densely packed than I recall.
As for the ferries, the rides are getting shorter. It’s not that the boats are getting faster. Developers are filling up the harbor and building on it and no one seems able to stop them, or even slow them down. They’re building a new Star Ferry pier at about the mid-point of what used to be the ferry’s crossing. When I first visited Hong Kong in 1978, taking the ferry from Central to Tsim Sha Tsui took about 12 to 15 minutes. Yesterday it took five. I won’t be surprised if within another 50 years or so the harbor disappears under new construction. After all, there’re a lot of ways to the container port. Ships can go around the south side of Hong Kong Island, why waste all that potentially valuable real estate?
Okay, so Hong Kong’s sort of nightmarish, in an exciting kind of way. It’s still fun to walk around in the crowds, especially at night when you’re showered with multi-hued neon and assaulted with a bewildering array of sounds and smells – some of which are pleasing and some of which make you want to flee screaming.
In the past, Macau was my quick fix getaway from the frenzy of Hong Kong. It was a rather sleepy Portuguese enclave on the south China coast. It was filled with charming, quiet neighborhoods that were a quirky mix of European and Asian architecture and culture. It was a place for long, wine-soaked lunches and casual strolls through beautiful gardens or old temples. Some of that still exists.
But Macau now takes pride in calling itself, “The Las Vegas of Asia.” Arriving at the ferry pier, practically the first thing you see is a giant fake mountain of what looks like dung. I think it’s supposed to be a volcano and one of these days it will put on an eruption show no doubt. It sits on reclaimed land just in front of a Disneyland-style recreation of part of the Forbidden City, next to Tibet’s Potala Palace and a faux Chinese fishing village. Looming over all of it is the hideous glass and neon façade of the new Sands Hotel and Casino.
The taxi into the city center passes dozens of dull cookie-cutter office and apartment blocks and several more new, garish casinos and hotels. There is a large construction site next to the Lisboa Hotel. Part of the Lisboa’s charm, so to speak, has been its unconscious striving for the title of the world’s ugliest building. The addition going up next door is so remarkably horrible that it can only be deliberate bad taste. There goes the charm.
Eva and I took a taxi out to Coloanne Island. Or at least, what used to be an island. It is now attached to Taipa Island by landfill on which a Venetian Hotel and Casino are being erected. Somehow the southeast corner of Coloanne has been spared and Fernando’s, at Hac Sa Beach, is as peaceful and delicious as ever. In the midst of the lunacy it remains one of the world’s greatest restaurants.
After lunch we did manage to walk around some of the remaining old neighborhoods and through the Lou Lim Iok gardens. Some of all the development money in the city does seem to have a conscience. So far at least, the old neighborhoods in the middle of the peninsula have been largely spared from the wrecking ball. Some of them have even been nicely restored.
Tired from our walk, we decided to go get massages. Now Macau has long been famous for prostitution and it’s not so easy to find a legitimate massage. But in the past they had a good, workable solution at the Lisboa Hotel. There was the Sauna Fuji and the corridors of the shopping area around the coffee shop for men looking for sex; and there was the Lisboa Health Spa, with both men’s and women’s sections, for people who wanted a good, “real” massage in a place that also offered saunas, jacuzzis, steambaths, etc.
I left Eva off at the women’s section and then ran the gauntlet of hookers down the hall to the elevator to the men’s section. I took a shower and a steambath and then went to the sitting area for a juice and to wait for my massage. The first clue that things had changed was when the waitress asked if I wanted a Thai massage or a Shanghai-style massage. Both of those places have traditions of legit massage, so I didn’t think too much of it. Since we’re going to Shanghai after Hong Kong, I opted for that style of massage.
A young woman in jeans and t-shirt came and led me through a maze of hallways to the massage room. It looked just like it always has: a small room with a massage table, a pile of towels, some oils and a box of tissues. The door had a large, lightly smoked glass window in it. I lay down on the table and the masseuse hopped up and started walking on my back. This struck me as a little odd, since they usually work their way up to that, but I figured she had her own technique. She was good at it too. I didn’t worry even once that she was going to leave me a paraplegic.
She wandered around up there for about ten minutes. Then hopped off and I heard her oiling up her hands. Then she squirted a bunch of oil on my ass and thrust a hand up underneath me from behind. Huh? I thought I was getting a legit massage.
She started a hard sell – she didn’t speak any English so there was a lot of mime and demonstration involved – for sex. She spoke enough English to let me know I could fuck her for one thousand Hong Kong dollars – a hundred and twenty-eight U.S. And, she knew how to say – both demonstratively and verbally: “No condom.”
I was tired, jet-lagged, sore from walking around all day. And aghast. I like sex as much as the next guy, probably more than a lot of the next guys, but I wanted a massage, only a massage. Even if I had wanted sex, no condom seemed like a particularly dumb idea. I argued with her for a while. It was clear that she only makes any money if she has sex with customers and she didn’t want to waste her time giving me a massage. I finally talked her into it, but it wasn’t any good. She desultorily rubbed my back for a few minutes and then cut the session short.
I tipped her, about what I would for a massage. She didn’t deserve it. But I felt a little guilty. We entered into the thing with different expectations and I could better afford the disappointment of mine than she could of hers. I complained to the management on the way out though. I told them I liked the old system better than the new one.
Is this all some sort of offbeat metaphor for the differences between the old Macau’s sleepy colonial system and the rapacious new Las Vegas of the East emerging from the fattened wallets of China’s so-called communists? I don’t know. I just don’t know.
It’s dirtier, a whole lot dirtier. It’s noisier than I recall and I remember it as the noisiest place I’ve ever been. It’s more crowded than ever and it was always the most crowded place I’d ever been. And, strangely, if you think ideologically rather than realistically, it is more nakedly, aggressively, greedily capitalist than ever. The people of Hong Kong, never shy about turning a buck, have ramped it up to yet more awe-inspiring heights than ever. Perhaps they’ve been egged on by the supposed quote from that great Chinese Communist leader, Deng Xiaoping: “To get rich is glorious.”
I lived here for 11 years and left one week after the “handover” back to China in 1997. I was last here in 2000. Then, the place seemed sort of depressed, not so sure of itself or where it was going. In spite of British colonialism it has always been a chinese city, but it didn’t seem quite so sure how it was going to do as a Chinese city. It seems to be doing fine, sort of.
There are a few, not so little, problems.
Before the handover the Chinese government promised; or was it that they implied; or was it simply an outright convenient lie that Hong Kong would have a democratically elected government before too long, maybe even as soon as seven or so years after 1997. That hasn’t happened, nor, to be honest, should anyone in their right mind really have expected it to. But there are plenty of people here who are not happy about that, who feel betrayed. There are plenty of others who seem to have the attitude of: ‘get over it, you’re making money aren’t you?’
The air quality here, while not so bad as the other eight Chinese cities that are among the world’s ten worst, is truly awful. And I know bad air when I breathe it. I grew up in Los Angeles when it had the world’s worst air. A lot of the bad air is blown on the prevailing southerly winds down the Pearl River from the north. There’s a whole lot of filthy factories up there. But Hong Kong’s contributing plenty of its own feculence to the stew. China, and by extension Hong Kong, actually has some of the world’s most advanced environmental regulations. Its auto emission standards are much stricter than the U.S. But enforcement is another matter. I’ve had a sinus headache since I arrived. I’m on a couple of Drixoral and regular fistfuls of aspirin daily and I’m managing it to within bearable parameters – just. Maybe if I lived here again for awhile I’d adjust. Maybe not.
One of the joys of living here when I did was that the territory has some of the world’s greatest transportation infrastructure. It still does. It’s fast, efficient and relatively cheap. But I’m getting the impression it’s verging on overwhelmed. When I lived in Hong Kong the population was around six million. It’s something around eight million now. And the place isn’t any bigger – well, other than all the newly reclaimed land in the shrinking harbor, but that’s all offices. So, traffic is a lot worse than it was. The subway, buses, trams, minibuses and ferries are much more densely packed than I recall.
As for the ferries, the rides are getting shorter. It’s not that the boats are getting faster. Developers are filling up the harbor and building on it and no one seems able to stop them, or even slow them down. They’re building a new Star Ferry pier at about the mid-point of what used to be the ferry’s crossing. When I first visited Hong Kong in 1978, taking the ferry from Central to Tsim Sha Tsui took about 12 to 15 minutes. Yesterday it took five. I won’t be surprised if within another 50 years or so the harbor disappears under new construction. After all, there’re a lot of ways to the container port. Ships can go around the south side of Hong Kong Island, why waste all that potentially valuable real estate?
Okay, so Hong Kong’s sort of nightmarish, in an exciting kind of way. It’s still fun to walk around in the crowds, especially at night when you’re showered with multi-hued neon and assaulted with a bewildering array of sounds and smells – some of which are pleasing and some of which make you want to flee screaming.
In the past, Macau was my quick fix getaway from the frenzy of Hong Kong. It was a rather sleepy Portuguese enclave on the south China coast. It was filled with charming, quiet neighborhoods that were a quirky mix of European and Asian architecture and culture. It was a place for long, wine-soaked lunches and casual strolls through beautiful gardens or old temples. Some of that still exists.
But Macau now takes pride in calling itself, “The Las Vegas of Asia.” Arriving at the ferry pier, practically the first thing you see is a giant fake mountain of what looks like dung. I think it’s supposed to be a volcano and one of these days it will put on an eruption show no doubt. It sits on reclaimed land just in front of a Disneyland-style recreation of part of the Forbidden City, next to Tibet’s Potala Palace and a faux Chinese fishing village. Looming over all of it is the hideous glass and neon façade of the new Sands Hotel and Casino.
The taxi into the city center passes dozens of dull cookie-cutter office and apartment blocks and several more new, garish casinos and hotels. There is a large construction site next to the Lisboa Hotel. Part of the Lisboa’s charm, so to speak, has been its unconscious striving for the title of the world’s ugliest building. The addition going up next door is so remarkably horrible that it can only be deliberate bad taste. There goes the charm.
Eva and I took a taxi out to Coloanne Island. Or at least, what used to be an island. It is now attached to Taipa Island by landfill on which a Venetian Hotel and Casino are being erected. Somehow the southeast corner of Coloanne has been spared and Fernando’s, at Hac Sa Beach, is as peaceful and delicious as ever. In the midst of the lunacy it remains one of the world’s greatest restaurants.
After lunch we did manage to walk around some of the remaining old neighborhoods and through the Lou Lim Iok gardens. Some of all the development money in the city does seem to have a conscience. So far at least, the old neighborhoods in the middle of the peninsula have been largely spared from the wrecking ball. Some of them have even been nicely restored.
Tired from our walk, we decided to go get massages. Now Macau has long been famous for prostitution and it’s not so easy to find a legitimate massage. But in the past they had a good, workable solution at the Lisboa Hotel. There was the Sauna Fuji and the corridors of the shopping area around the coffee shop for men looking for sex; and there was the Lisboa Health Spa, with both men’s and women’s sections, for people who wanted a good, “real” massage in a place that also offered saunas, jacuzzis, steambaths, etc.
I left Eva off at the women’s section and then ran the gauntlet of hookers down the hall to the elevator to the men’s section. I took a shower and a steambath and then went to the sitting area for a juice and to wait for my massage. The first clue that things had changed was when the waitress asked if I wanted a Thai massage or a Shanghai-style massage. Both of those places have traditions of legit massage, so I didn’t think too much of it. Since we’re going to Shanghai after Hong Kong, I opted for that style of massage.
A young woman in jeans and t-shirt came and led me through a maze of hallways to the massage room. It looked just like it always has: a small room with a massage table, a pile of towels, some oils and a box of tissues. The door had a large, lightly smoked glass window in it. I lay down on the table and the masseuse hopped up and started walking on my back. This struck me as a little odd, since they usually work their way up to that, but I figured she had her own technique. She was good at it too. I didn’t worry even once that she was going to leave me a paraplegic.
She wandered around up there for about ten minutes. Then hopped off and I heard her oiling up her hands. Then she squirted a bunch of oil on my ass and thrust a hand up underneath me from behind. Huh? I thought I was getting a legit massage.
She started a hard sell – she didn’t speak any English so there was a lot of mime and demonstration involved – for sex. She spoke enough English to let me know I could fuck her for one thousand Hong Kong dollars – a hundred and twenty-eight U.S. And, she knew how to say – both demonstratively and verbally: “No condom.”
I was tired, jet-lagged, sore from walking around all day. And aghast. I like sex as much as the next guy, probably more than a lot of the next guys, but I wanted a massage, only a massage. Even if I had wanted sex, no condom seemed like a particularly dumb idea. I argued with her for a while. It was clear that she only makes any money if she has sex with customers and she didn’t want to waste her time giving me a massage. I finally talked her into it, but it wasn’t any good. She desultorily rubbed my back for a few minutes and then cut the session short.
I tipped her, about what I would for a massage. She didn’t deserve it. But I felt a little guilty. We entered into the thing with different expectations and I could better afford the disappointment of mine than she could of hers. I complained to the management on the way out though. I told them I liked the old system better than the new one.
Is this all some sort of offbeat metaphor for the differences between the old Macau’s sleepy colonial system and the rapacious new Las Vegas of the East emerging from the fattened wallets of China’s so-called communists? I don’t know. I just don’t know.
Monday, February 27, 2006
Monkeys With Abacuses*
Wednesday morning, Eva and I will fly from Los Angeles to Hong Kong. I’m embarking on a book tour, of sorts, of China. (See the appearances section for the details.) If all goes according to schedule we’ll probably spend 21 or so hours in transit from our house to our hotel.
I bought these tickets about three months ago and got a very good deal - $679 plus tax - on Cathay Pacific. It’s Hong Kong’s flagship airline, and as airline’s go, one of the best.
Before I bought the tickets though, I looked into flying business class. That seemed like a good idea. The cheapest business class tickets I found were about $2,300 each – on Taiwan’s EVA Air – and they came with a layover and change of planes in Taipei. I decided to stick with economy class.
Out of curiosity, when I bought the tickets on Cathay’s website, I looked up the business and first class fares for the same flight. Business class came to $15,703.72 for the two of us. First class was an astounding $27,093.72.
So I did some math. (I was terrible at math, and hated it, when I was a kid in school. Now that I’m not in school I can amuse myself for hours by parsing numbers.)
First I needed to take into account that if you buy “extra seats,” you don’t get charged the tax for them. The tax on Eva and my two economy class seats came to $316.56. So, I had to subtract that from the business and first class fares before dividing by $679 – the untaxed price of our seats.
For the price of two roundtrip business class fares on Cathay Pacific from Los Angeles to Hong Kong, we could have bought 22.66 (call it 23) economy seats. We could have bought 39.9 (call it 40) seats for the first class fare.
On the 747-400 Premium, there’s a small section of 30 economy seats just behind business class. For two first class fares we could have had that entire section to ourselves, with ten more seats elsewhere in the plane in case we got bored and wanted to move around.
Back when I lived in Hong Kong and flew regularly around Asia on business, I did spend some time in Cathay’s business class section. Once, on a flight from Hong Kong to Tokyo, I was even upgraded to first class. They are excellent ways to fly.
In Cathay’s business class the seats are more comfortable than any chairs Eva and I’ve got in our home. The entertainment is excellent. The food is nearly restaurant – a good restaurant – quality and they pour wines that we might break out on special occasions, but only then. They’ve even got a couple choices of single malt scotch.
First class was splendid. The only other chairs I’ve ever spent any time in that were as comfortable are the La-Z Boys at the home of my pals Bill and Stephanie. And those chairs aren’t as well appointed with beverage holders, work surfaces, lighting and individual entertainment consoles. Plus, if I ever tried to ring a buzzer to summon Bill or Stephanie and ask them to get me another perfectly chilled top-shelf vodka or more Beluga caviar or smoked salmon, they’d probably throw me out on my ass.
Even the bathrooms are nicer, a lot nicer, in business and first class.
But that’s an awful lot of money to simply sit in a stupor in a big metal tube for even the 15 hours and 20 minutes we’re scheduled to be in the air.
I suppose I could have bought us each our own small row of three seats. I can manage to stretch out reasonably well across three seats when the armrests are up. That would have cost us a little more than a third (35.767% to be precise) the price of two business class seats.
Is business class any better than that? Maybe to some people it is. Not to me it isn’t. But if Cathay Pacific wanted to give us an upgrade, well, we wouldn’t turn it down. If there’s a screaming child anywhere within earshot, maybe the extra expense would have been worth it. They don’t let them do that sort of thing in business or first class. Do they?
* The title of this blog isn’t mine. It comes from Janet Reid, my agent. It’s what she emailed me when I emailed to ask who figures out airline price structures. Also, there is, apparently, some controversy about how to spell the plural of abacus. I’ve used the Oxford English Dictionary’s form.
I bought these tickets about three months ago and got a very good deal - $679 plus tax - on Cathay Pacific. It’s Hong Kong’s flagship airline, and as airline’s go, one of the best.
Before I bought the tickets though, I looked into flying business class. That seemed like a good idea. The cheapest business class tickets I found were about $2,300 each – on Taiwan’s EVA Air – and they came with a layover and change of planes in Taipei. I decided to stick with economy class.
Out of curiosity, when I bought the tickets on Cathay’s website, I looked up the business and first class fares for the same flight. Business class came to $15,703.72 for the two of us. First class was an astounding $27,093.72.
So I did some math. (I was terrible at math, and hated it, when I was a kid in school. Now that I’m not in school I can amuse myself for hours by parsing numbers.)
First I needed to take into account that if you buy “extra seats,” you don’t get charged the tax for them. The tax on Eva and my two economy class seats came to $316.56. So, I had to subtract that from the business and first class fares before dividing by $679 – the untaxed price of our seats.
For the price of two roundtrip business class fares on Cathay Pacific from Los Angeles to Hong Kong, we could have bought 22.66 (call it 23) economy seats. We could have bought 39.9 (call it 40) seats for the first class fare.
On the 747-400 Premium, there’s a small section of 30 economy seats just behind business class. For two first class fares we could have had that entire section to ourselves, with ten more seats elsewhere in the plane in case we got bored and wanted to move around.
Back when I lived in Hong Kong and flew regularly around Asia on business, I did spend some time in Cathay’s business class section. Once, on a flight from Hong Kong to Tokyo, I was even upgraded to first class. They are excellent ways to fly.
In Cathay’s business class the seats are more comfortable than any chairs Eva and I’ve got in our home. The entertainment is excellent. The food is nearly restaurant – a good restaurant – quality and they pour wines that we might break out on special occasions, but only then. They’ve even got a couple choices of single malt scotch.
First class was splendid. The only other chairs I’ve ever spent any time in that were as comfortable are the La-Z Boys at the home of my pals Bill and Stephanie. And those chairs aren’t as well appointed with beverage holders, work surfaces, lighting and individual entertainment consoles. Plus, if I ever tried to ring a buzzer to summon Bill or Stephanie and ask them to get me another perfectly chilled top-shelf vodka or more Beluga caviar or smoked salmon, they’d probably throw me out on my ass.
Even the bathrooms are nicer, a lot nicer, in business and first class.
But that’s an awful lot of money to simply sit in a stupor in a big metal tube for even the 15 hours and 20 minutes we’re scheduled to be in the air.
I suppose I could have bought us each our own small row of three seats. I can manage to stretch out reasonably well across three seats when the armrests are up. That would have cost us a little more than a third (35.767% to be precise) the price of two business class seats.
Is business class any better than that? Maybe to some people it is. Not to me it isn’t. But if Cathay Pacific wanted to give us an upgrade, well, we wouldn’t turn it down. If there’s a screaming child anywhere within earshot, maybe the extra expense would have been worth it. They don’t let them do that sort of thing in business or first class. Do they?
* The title of this blog isn’t mine. It comes from Janet Reid, my agent. It’s what she emailed me when I emailed to ask who figures out airline price structures. Also, there is, apparently, some controversy about how to spell the plural of abacus. I’ve used the Oxford English Dictionary’s form.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
