Back to Hong Kong with Great Expectations

Happily, the flight from Penang to Hong Kong left on time so I didn't spend much time in Penang airport. It's an odd airport - there is a McDonalds and a quite decent coffee shop before you go through security, but airside there's a small stall selling two kinds of potato crisp and one kind of bottled water. Does that imply that McDonalds is some sort of security threat? Or that people go to the airport for fine food, but only if they're not actually flying?

The plane was almost full, but I'd booked a seat in the front row, so I was boarded first, rather than having to contend with the elbows of a dozen tiny old Chinese ladies. I passed out as soon as the plane took off, then awoke to read the rest of Great Expectations.

Just like The Silence Of The Lambs, I had a passing familiarity with the plot without ever having experienced it, but I wasn't up to speed with all the coincidences and interrelations in the plot. It's the kind of book that I could have been made to read as a teenager and hated; now, decades on, I find it really enjoyable. Some things you have to leave for a while to mature.

It has obviously been quite odd to be sitting in a hotel on an island off the coast of Malaysia, reading a nineteenth-century English author writing about cold, foggy marshes, on a Chinese manufactured laptop. Either I've gone post-cultural, or I should have been engaging more with the local culture. But seeing as everyone else in the hotel was taking pains not to go outside and experience any part of Malaysia that wasn't provided by the resort, maybe I was behaving in a culturally correct way.

At the end of my flight, having finished Great Expectations and ploughed halfway through Rule 34, I sprinted off the plane. Although I was the first person off, I was stymied by the train you have to take from one end of Hong Kong airport to the other, and by the time I got through Customs there must have at least two people in front of me. But I boarded the express back to Hong Kong without any delay, and an hour and a half later I was on stage in a basement in Elgin Street, making off-colour remarks to a group of strangers. Hong Kong really is an efficiently wierd sort of place.