The plane descends and I start to get nervous. It has nothing to do with fear of crashing. Sometimes I think that would be the preferable outcome. No, instead the fear is due to a game of Russian roulette my body plays on each landing. You see, occasionally I suffer from barotrauma headaches (related to, or also known as aerosinusitis). At least that’s the self-diagnosis.

As we lose altitude, I’ll feel a burning sensation just under the skin of my forehead, near the hairline. It’s always the left side. As though blood in my veins were boiling, the pain increases and spreads until it reaches behind my left eye. It takes only a few seconds for it to spread, and leaves me with 10 to sometimes 20 minutes of agony before we land. My body starts involuntarily shaking. I begin to worry that this time I’m not going to be left unscarred, this time my eardrum is going to rupture or pop.

The first time this occurred I was on a flight from Salt Lake City to Columbus, Ohio. It was within a month of September 11th, 2001. I woke up from a short nap with such intense pain that I honestly feared I might be dying. I thought this must be what a brain aneurysm felt like. The flight attendant took note of my anxious and pained condition, but offered nothing more than the knowledge that we would land soon and hope of a medical professional at the airport. I’m not sure if it was the heightened sensitivities of days following the terrorist strikes or if my own behavior was simply terrifying enough, but I ended up being taken off the plane on a stretcher. The paramedics in Columbus gave me water, some pills and a place to rest for an hour or two until I felt well enough to drive home.

After that first experience, I can recognize the warning signs and be a bit more prepared. A flight attendant will usually find time during the busy landing sequence to attend to me. With only one exception, they all appear to recognize what’s going on and why I’m making an odd request: two boiling-hot towels stuffed into the bottom of two cups. These both end up tightly pressed around my ears. If I didn’t already look insane because of the shaking, sweating and nervous stroking of my face, I definitely pass the crazy threshold when I clamp two cups to my head. I don’t care. If the other passengers had any idea how bad this hurt, they’d try any wacko remedy they came across too.

The cup trick was taught to me by a flight attendant and in my experience it has helped. The headaches are most likely caused by improper de-pressurization of the sinuses. My guess is that the hot moist air trapped in the cups helps open up sinus passages, allowing normalization. I don’t think I hold them tight enough to make any difference in air pressure. Who knows, could just be a trick to have me think about something other than my brain exploding.

This drama thankfully doesn’t happen on each flight. It doesn’t seem to happen on most flights. But in the last 5 or 6 years, I’ve experienced this at least 5 or 6 times. It’s often enough that each flight is a spin of the wheel. For example, to get from Hong Kong to Portland, I took three flights with layovers in Beijing and San Francisco. It was only on landing in San Francisco that I wanted to cry. The flight to Portland was shortly afterwards, and I had steaming cups ready as I was still sore from the earlier attack. I had also drank as much water as a could between the flights, hoping that would help. The Portland landing was fairly smooth and what pain I did have could have just been left over from the earlier flight. So why one of out three? Was it the longer flight? The little nap I took just before landing? Did my sinus conditions really change all that much between three consecutive flights?

Relating pain to others is tricky. If something hurts bad enough to warrant talking about, then there’s a temptation to exaggerate the experience to ward off those skeptic or unempathetic and garner attention worthy of the trauma. A google search for ”airplane headache landing” returns around 350,000 accounts, many of which mirror mine. If you’ve experienced this yourself, I’d really like to hear about it. Likewise, if you’re traveling soon and you have a stuffy nose or a history of sinus conditions, take a decongestant such as pseudoephedrine before your fly. And stay hydrated before and during the flight. Finally, if you ever come across someone in trauma during landing, you can suggest the cup trick. It can’t hurt (well, unless the towels are scalding and burn their ears, but then they’ll at least have something else to think about).

It’s said that Hong Kong is a good place to be if you’re a millionaire, and New York City never sleeps. These two cities are highly influential not only to their respective hemispheres, but to the world. When it comes to a metropolis, New York and Hong Kong are heavy hitters, but the things that make them tick exemplify the old adage “east meets west.”

People

What’s a city without the individuals who dare to be there? And honestly, I think the biggest difference between Hong Kong and NYC are the people. New York’s 8.2 million residents are not only more diversified, but they have exponential amounts of attitude. Hong Kong’s 7 million are like an army of silent robots compared to it’s western counterpart. Like Ani Defranco’s song lyrics, ” I can’t wait to get back to New York City where at least when I walk down the street nobody ever hesitates to tell me exactly what they think of me.”

For example:

I was on the NYC subway heading away from the Bronx zoo with my three year old daughter. Being 95 degrees, she was wearing an above the knee Chinese bubble skirt that featured built-in shorts. Tossing and turning in her stroller, she was trying to fall asleep.

Suddenly, I was approached by a fat woman who said, “Can you do me a favor and tell your daughter to close her legs?”

Speechless, I gasped and stared at her with an incredulous look. My face said, “Are you seriously talking to me?”

The woman lumbered back to her seat, which was diagonal from us. My head cleared and I realised that she actually was talking to me and that she was serious.

I leaned forward, looking her hard in the eye and reprimanded her, “You need to mind your own business.”

She rattled off something about how rude it was to be subjected to looking up my daughters skirt, which, let me remind you, was furnished with shorts underneath.

I immediately retorted, “Do you know what? She’s THREE years old.”

She huffed and puffed, expecting me to engage in her ridiculous replies to which I wanted no part of.

Ten minutes passed. She exited the train, snuck around to my car, popped her head back into the train and yelled, “You’re such a slut!”

That’s New York City.

Unwritten Hong Kong subway rules:

Don’t speak to anyone. Offer your seat to the elderly, pregnant, and children. Avoid eye contact.

Hong Kong subways are eerily quiet. One amazing feat about Hong Kong is that there are hordes of people everywhere and yet they don’t sound like a hoard. Around the world, it’s pretty normal to experience silence in a crowded elevator. But when you can’t see two feet ahead of you on a crowded street, and yet you can hear traffic from blocks away, you know you’re in Hong Kong.

I have been living in Hong Kong for over a year and strangers have rarely spoken to me. Yet for two days in New York City, I’ve been complimented on my clothes, asked my opinion regarding Hong Kong subway cleanliness, and told that the next city I’ll move to is Seattle. Did I mention that I was called a slut?

Cleanliness

Hong Kong’s population density is paramount compared to The Big Apple. It’s not the densest city in Asia, because India has everyone beat. Of Hong Kong’s 426 square miles, only 25% is developed. The rest is pristine rolling mountains, green and fresh. It makes for a compelling backdrop to the never-ending clusters of skyscrapers. New York City comes in number two for land area with 304 square miles. For every thousand New York residents, only 4.4 acres of public open space is available. Oh yes, that is developed land.

Hong Kong and New York City both have air quality issues, but when it comes to cleanliness, Hong Kong is leagues above New York City. Hong Kong’s subway system, however small in size, is comparable to the conditions of a 4 star hotel lobby. You’d be hard pressed to find litter on the roads or sidewalks. An army of sweet sweepers is a nice feature of Hong Kong.

New York City’s subways are filthy, which adds an element of fear. It’s easy to spot litter most anywhere you go, and it’s also easy to find people publicly urinating. Three weeks before I left Hong Kong, I bought a pair of leather sandals. I wore them all throughout Hong Kong and they remained as clean as the day I bought them. Two days in New York City and these sandals were black and stinking.

Culture

New York City reigns champion for cultural diversity. On a New York City subway, it’s easy to spot Sanskrit newspapers, Muslim veils, Jewish kip-pas adorned on small boys, people singing for money, hookers, kids selling candy in order to “stay off the streets”, and don’t forget the smelly drunks.

What can you see in a Hong Kong subway? Asians of course, because 95% of Hong Kong is Chinese and the other 5% are mostly transplants from somewhere in Asia. Although, Hong Kong is a major financial hub so there’s always a few Caucasians on the city center subway lines.

When I was in New York City, I went to a small Catholic carnival on the side streets of Brooklyn. The quaint, bright-light carnival was contained in a few block radius and yet it wasn’t overly crowded. If something like that went on in Hong Kong, it would be ridiculously crowded. There aren’t a constant string of cultural happenings in Hong Kong. Rather, they are planned out and carefully advertised which usually pack in the people.

Hong Kong surely can’t touch the bigger events, like New York Broadway for example. Few big shows come through Hong Kong and when they do, everyone knows about it because of huge advertising schemes on the sides of skyscrapers and full page adverts in the local newspapers.

Where would I rather live?

Every time I’m in an airplane and can see US soil, I start to get teary and songs like “America the Beautiful” play in my head. I feel like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. “There’s no place like home.” There is a familiarity in the US, whether it’s New York City or a small town. I’ll never achieve that comfort in Hong Kong, no matter how long I stay.

But I also value green space and cleanliness. New York City is raw, and that’s certainly part of it’s overall charm, but city rawness comes with highly unpleasant smells, sights and sounds. Hong Kong is so wealthy, and it’s so manicured that the raw element is greatly decreased leaving a clean, efficient and tightly run city. Perhaps if I wasn’t so addicted to nature, I’d be more in love with New York City. But for me, I’d choose Hong Kong any day over New York City.

A 2006 International Student Assessment survey revealed where the smart kids are in the world. Drumroll please… Asia, Finland and Canada. This survey ranked reading, mathematics, and science. Where did the US rank? Something like 30th place. Americans, at least the 15-year-olds who were tested, are below average.

What’s wrong with America, or more poignantly, what’s everyone else doing that’s so much better?

I’ve been working in the Hong Kong education system. By the way, Hong Kong rated #2 in science and #3 in mathematics and reading. And from my experience, these kids are smart.

They are thrown into school when they turn 3 years old. They attend three years of Kindergarten, known as K1, K2, & K3 here. Mandatory schooling for Hong Kong is K3, then primary, then secondary school. But most every Hong Kong child attends K1 & K2.

K1 is the equivalent of adjusting that brand new fish you got at the pet store to your aquarium at home by keeping it in the bag for a half hour before it’s set loose in the new water.

K1 kids learn how to act in a classroom. Teacher tactics are simple: make the children feel like part of the group. Do what the group does or be publicly humiliated. No child is special.

Daily activities include learning simple Chinese characters, the letters of the English alphabet, arts and crafts, and then a little bit of playtime is thrown in, often guided playtime. Expect a half hour of homework every night.

K2 starts to get intense. Now it’s time for these five-year-olds to start learning how to read and write. By the time K2 is over, each child should know how to write a few dozen Chinese characters. And they can read simple English words as well. And don’t forget the homework!

K3 is where the heat is on. By six years old, Hong Kong children are expected to know how to write about a hundred Chinese characters. They can read many more Chinese characters and also simple sentences in English. The homework is stepped up a notch so their schoolbags get loaded. A K3 school bag includes 6 or 7 small workbooks and text books. Children have homework tallies that parents must sign off on a daily basis. The schools are preparing them for the next 10 to 15 years of hard-core learning.

My friend tutors children between 10 and 16 years old. In her opinion, these Hong Kong children are smart, but it’s all rote memorization. Ask these kids a personal question or something that requires creative thinking, and you’ll find an unsatisfactory answer. If you get one at all.

The result is children who are book smart, but lack certain social and creative skills.

In speaking with ex-pat businessmen who have to train these students in the workplace, it’s always the same story. Their work ethic is strict. They excel at following commands. Yet, no one wants to be a leader in the workplace. Their comfort zone is a hierarchal system. If the man-in-charge asks the workers for an opinion on something or for constructional feedback, the employees take it as a sign of weakness and loose respect for the boss.

Of course, there are exceptions, and many of these characteristics extend beyond education into the larger cultural profile. Still, the seeds are planted in these Kindergartens. Seeds that grow into world-class test-taking 15 year olds.

As noted on my other website, cubicle muses and peregrinari have gotten a paint job and a new engine under the hood. The old blogging system was never all that easy for Jenny to use and often required her to wait for me to publish her articles. Given how packed my schedule is these days, that hasn’t worked out too well. Our blogging slowed down this spring and was almost non-existent this summer, despite both of us wanting to write more often. These factors motivated me to finally upgrade the website and improve the layout.

Peregrinari began as a travelogue, recording our adventure heading off to China with just a couple of suitcases and a vague idea of where we might land. Over a year later, we’ve settled in Hong Kong to find ourselves in more comfortable daily rhythms. So it’s time for a shake-up. Jenny and I will both be traveling for the rest of the summer (me to the US West and Jenny and Maeli to the US East). The fall is going to bring a number of new twists as William and I prepare our startup project for an alpha release while Jenny takes a crack at writing her first book. We have every best intention of recording this madness on our new-and-improved weblog.

Those intentions also include writing for a larger audience than friends and family back home. As seen in Jenny’s last two articles on daycare and teaching ESL, we’ll be publishing articles no more than just our misadventures, though we’ll be sure to report those as well.

And we’d really like to start seeing more discussion on the peregrinari weblog, so feel free to leave your thoughts, feedback and questions. If you have trouble with the comment form, you can email me directly at farra@apache.org. Hope to hear from you!

Recently, there has been chatter about the day care fumble at the Googleplex in California. Google has been nurturing state-of-the-art daycare, following its philosophy of doing things better than anyone else in the world. But it’s not cheap. The search engine company just raised their prices by 75%. If you work for Google and want to put your infant in daycare, it’s now going to cost $2,500 per month. OUCH. But considering that some Google workers aren’t hurting for cash (those lucky I.P.O millionaires), maybe this isn’t such a big deal.

Personally, $30,000 a year for daycare is bit steep for me. But then again, I live in Hong Kong where I’ve come to expect affordable help. Full-time nanny service, professional house cleaner, cook, car washer, and gardener costs less than $475 USD per month. Full time means 6 days per week! And if you want to send your child to one of the best half-day school facilities (before they are 6 years old) in order to fit in that precious social time, it will run around $800 USD per month. But that’s just if you want to send your little Einstein to the creme de la creme of Hong Kong Kindergartens. Alternatively you could ship your child to the local Chinese kindergarten for less than $200 per month. So you do the math. (Well, actually it comes out of no more than $1275 a month or $15,300 a year).

In the start of September, we will send Maeli to the local Waldorf school on Lamma. It’s an English medium school with one teacher and a class of 8 children between 3 and 6 years old. Considering that we pay our domestic helper above market rate (whom we’ll be keeping around), our costs for Maeli will be $1,200 USD per month. Full-time daycare in the US averages around $1,100 USD per month. And yet the average American mother and father still miss out on the home services of cooking, cleaning, babysitting, gardening, etc.

If you find yourself asking whether or not to pack up your bags and leave your homeland to teach English as a second language, here are a few ideas regarding the pros and cons of that choice.

Do I need experience to teach English?

No, no, and no again. Even in the modern and westernized cities like Hong Kong and Singapore, if you are a native English speaker, there is a job waiting for you whether or not you’ve ever done it before. Granted, that job is probably in a nursery or kindergarten, but once you put in a year at the lower levels, then you can climb your way to older audiences. In countries that are not so modernized, your options are much more open.

Do I need a university degree to teach English?

Yes, yes, and yes again. Without a four-year degree, most companies won’t look twice at you. In fact, some countries are instituting tighter requirements. For example, by 2012 Hong Kong will require teachers have appropriate certification, which equates to 2 years of part time schooling. The down side is that this Hong Kong certification isn’t valid in any other city.

Will I make a lot of money teaching English?

A lot of people head to foreign lands in the hopes of paying back school loans or putting money away for future plans. If you are single, there is some money to be saved, but not much. ESL teachers generally make more than the local teachers, but it’s not anything to write home about.

Is teaching English easy?

Whoever claims that teaching (any kind of teaching) is easy must have some supernatural talent. Teaching, in general, requires good management skills, excellent inter-personal skills, creativity, an endless supply of patience, solid planning, and a lot of time. So take that a step further and teach children/adults who generally don’t understand most of what you’re saying. It’s more than hard work. Expect to be physically and mentally exhausted at the end of your days, especially at the beginning.

Is teaching English fun?

If you are a fun person, then teaching will be fun. You are in charge of your lessons, so you set the tone, pace, and often make up most of the materials. When I walk into my schools, the children cheer and call to me like I’m a rock star. Why? I’m a good storyteller, and I leave all the discipline to the regular classroom teachers. Why be the bad guy when that ugly job can easily be outsourced?

Can I teach English to learn the local language?

Native English speakers are hired to teach and speak English, not to learn the language of the country they’re in. When at work, ESL teachers have rigorous teaching hours – an average of five per day. Other time is spent preparing, typing lessons plans, and eating lunch. It is even appropriate in Asian cultures to take a short nap after lunch with your head on the desk. I’m often guilty of that simply because teaching English is exhausting. So throughout the workday, there is little time to focus on learning the local language. That said, there might be opportunities to find co-workers or other acquaintances to participate in language exchange after work. I’ve seen only a very few ESL job advertisements that offer free language lessons as a perk. In short, it takes a lot of discipline and hard work to learn the local language as an ESL teacher. It doesn’t happen naturally.

Can teaching English help me learn the culture?

There is no way you’ll escape the culture! Throughout the year, ESL teachers witness whatever holidays the schools are celebrating. If you are teaching adults, this may not apply to you. Constantly being surrounded by foreigners, you’ll pick up everyday nuances, like how to properly greet, give and accept gifts, show respect, etc. There are also extra activities, like teacher’s luncheons, where great insight into the culture can be learned.

Will I make lots of friends teaching English?

This depends on what country you’re in. Personally, I found it near impossible to make friends with my Hong Kong co-workers. This is despite my extremely friendly and outgoing personality. I know ESL teachers in other countries who’ve had pleasant experiences with co-workers. But I must say that where ever you are, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll make other western friends. I have loads of ex-pat friends because it’s easy to connect with someone in the same boat. But you may not find such luck with the locals.

Is landing an ESL job easy?

If you have a four year degree and English is your mother tongue, then getting a job is easy. Asia in particular is dying for English teachers. Most companies will pay for your airfare there and back again. Most places will help you find an apartment once you arrive. Sometimes living accommodations are included in the salary package. But be wary of this, as some foreign accommodations are not up to snuff with western standards. Also, if you’re Caucasian, the chances of landing a job just went up. If you have blue eyes and especially blond hair, you better be asking for a higher salary. Believe it or not, those features mean a lot, particularly in Asia.

Edit: fixed some typos