Little babies on the hillside
I am sitting in the travellers lounge of Hong Kong International, where the lights are permanently dimmed and everyone staggers around staring into space, seeing magic-eye 3D pictures in the carpet pattern or zoning out meditatively in front of the king-size Toblerones. I love this airport and I love this city - it's just a shame I'm always passing through and never get to leave the airport.
Christmas. Christmas was good and it felt very different from what we normally do. Hannah and I were a bit freaked out by the child-centric life at my sister's when we arrived, but after two weeks of telling stories, conducting bath times, rocking babies to sleep on our chests, and talking in silly voices, we have really bonded with my little baby nephews and it feels horrible leaving them. Especially since we only see them once a year if we're lucky. Other people's baby stories are, of course, unutterably boring, so I won't say any more but take it from me that we are smitten.
The Australian summer turned out to be a bit more tropical than we had anticipated. To be precise, it poured with rain for most of the last week thanks to a cyclone parked off the Queensland coast. Not ones to renege on our pre-holiday boasts, we still swam in the pool every day, often in the middle of the storms, swimming mostly in rainwater and lapping desperately as part of a futile attempt to work off some of the calories accrued during the nonstop seasonal snacking. My sister's husband being Polish, we had the justly-famous 12-dish dinner on Christmas Eve, which would have finished me off even if we didn't have all of Christmas Day's culinary excesses to follow it.
We did well with presents. Hannah and I got each other new bags, weirdly, and mine is perfectly-sized to fit into a Vélib’ basket. Right now the idea of going back to work seems very depressing. But we still have a day's worth of flying time ahead of us, to read and sleep and watch movies on Cathay Pacific's unpredictable and quixotic inflight entertainment system. So far I've got through Machete (shamelessly enjoyable), Dinner for Schmucks (quite shit), Inception (not as good as I heard it was, and definitely worse than similar movies like Shutter Island or anything by David Lynch), The Constant Gardener (great), Killers (quite fun), and Chloe (a mostly-rubbish remake of a French film I like called Nathalie, although anything involving Juliane Moore and Amanda Seyfried getting it on is not all bad. And now I come to write about it, I remember verybadhorse, before she heartlessly defriended me, once asking if there were any films where a wife has a lesbian affair with her husband's mistress - well this should fit the bill).
I seem to have ended up on another tangent here. I'll just say I hope everyone had a good break and wish you all a happy New Year.
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