On the Hop

Up early – 4:30 – to catch the Hickory Hop to the Charlotte airport.  After this many trips, we’ve figured out that we need an hour to pull it together regardless of how much we try to do in advance.

Thermostats have to be reprogrammed.

Turn the water off upstairs (forgot that one this time around)

Set lights on timers.

COFFEE.

This time we also had Mr. Stitch, who opted to stay with Eliseo during this trip rather than go to Ms. Jane’s Doggy Day Spa.  He was not happy to get up that early, and was even less happy when he realized that he WAS going outside to do his business, regardless of the fact that it was still dark out.  After that, he went up to go back to bed with Yoko.

At the Hop, we found that we weren’t the only ones on board this morning.  There was a young lady who promptly laid down across the back seats and went to sleep – I suspect a college student, then the driver was trying to track down an errant passenger who hadn’t showed.  More about that later.

Eventually, we took off right on time to pick up someone at one of the hotels.  As luck would have it, he turned out to be from – HONG KONG – and was here for training.  He offered some insight about our first stop.

Mr. HK pointed out that it’s a city, not a country, and for those who are now in their 40’s and 50’s, it was a British colony.  Thus, their ideology is more Western than Asian in many respects.

They speak Cantonese as their native dialect, but the “official” language during the time it was a colony was, of course, English.  When the Chinese government took over again, they tried to focus things more to make Beijng happy rather than the locals, so suddenly the official language is Mandarin.  This, of course, led to a change in the educational system and in something of an anomaly, younger people aren’t as fluent in English as older ones.  It’s apparently still taught in school, but not as rigorously as before.

He talked some about the political unrest there.  The more senior adults, being used to the democratic form of government with which they were raised, are unwilling to give up some of the freedoms to which they are accustomed.  The central government out of Beijng, though, is intent on seeing their version of administration implemented, regardless of what the locals want.

This is being fueled to some extent by the fact that the population has now grown to about 8 million people, of which some 40% have emigrated from mainland China.  When the British were in charge, emigration was much more restricted with regard to the Chinese.

The result of this is that regardless of what the long-time residents want, any “elections” that occur can be easily dominated by the recent arrivals.

Think about the communities where a religious group or white supremacists or someone who doesn’t share the typical US thinking move into a small town and are able to take over because their populations are now sufficient to sway elections.

We probably wouldn’t like it, either.

Oh, and he also said be prepared for crowds.  New York City at Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade type crowds.  It’s coming up on the Chinese New Year, which is their major holiday, so lots of people have come into Hong Kong either to visit family or to shop or whatever.

So back to the Hop.  Our errant passenger didn’t show, the driver called and left messages a couple of times, and eventually they started on without him.

Then dispatch called and said he was there.  By then, we were in Brookford, almost ready to get on the highway.  Do we go back or continue and he just had bad luck. 

They problem-solved effectively.  The dispatcher popped the passenger (who turned out to be a little old man) into her car, made arrangements to catch the Hop at the on-ramp and conducted a passenger exchange.

Everybody on board, everybody happy.