Saturday, October 27, 2007

Our visitors left this morning. They took a taxi to the airport and paid with a HKD1000 note. Visitors were too groggy to notice at the time but the driver sneaked in a 500 Peruvian note amongst the change, which is apparently the same colour as a HKD500 note.

(I felt bad as I received this news, initially. It is worth noting how I felt responsible for bad things happening to other people which had nothing to do with me. I think this is a character defect on my part. Please pray for me. Thank you very much.)

The internet tells us that 500 Peruvian rupees is worth over HKD1000! Seems too good to be true now dunnit. Is the internet to be trusted with matters of this nature?

Anyhowse, I think I better rewind a bit here now.

Got home around midnight last night, stayed up till two working on this talk which I had to give this morning. There is a lot that I wanted to say but was too drunk last night to work it out in my head properly. Dragged my arse out of bed at 7:30, showered, printed the paper, and headed out.

The lecture theatre in which this do took place was an actual refrigerator. I have plenty of body fat but still I was shivering and couldn't really concentrate. Someone gave me a shawl and I was grateful for that. But even when wrapped round in it, I was STILL freezing my arse off.

Apparently the air-con system, is all centralised and there is nothing they could do about the temperature. You either have the air-con on, or off, thank you very much.

To keep warm, I drank five cups of coffee in two hours. As a result, I had to go to the loo five times before I was due to deliver my little speech.

I was so cold that I was losing control of my limps and my senses. As I tried to drink my second coffee, I tipped the cup up against my lips, or what I thought were my lips, and instead of hot coffee going into my mouth, it all went down my chest. For some reason, the cold had so interfered with my ability to drink coffee that I was behaving like an 18 month old!

Nice one, no? delivering a keynote speech with a massive coffee stain on your chest! Really draws attention to your boobs, that one! and makes you look really professional and respectable etc.

Well despite all this, my talk was very received and I was invited to go on a radio show this Friday to talk more of the same.

3 comments:

Jamie said...

I felt responsible too! I conceived a plan to go and hang around Kowloon waiting for taxis and saying I wanted to go to the airport- until I found that same taxi driver and throttled him.

Now in my case, we may really be dealing with a character defect.

krntsng said...

Hilarious man. Hilarious.

Now you've got me thinking... Noam Chomsky is giving a lecture at my university next week. What could possibly be cooler than that?

A lecture given by Noam Chomsky when he has a coffee-stained shirt.

Ressssssspect.

Pierre said...

nosebleed - on the other hand, no world city is complete without dodgy taxi drivers.

karen - the Chomsky! enjoy the tak and take it easy don't go throwing no coffee at his face!