Saturday May 6 2006

I’ll be hiking along a path going up to the Peak, and I’ll see beautiful purple flowers scattered on the ground and I’ll think “oh, I need to describe this for my friends”. Or further on I’ll pass a little path going off to the side, with red Chinese flags, gold lettering, and a faint smell of incense (this was yesterday, on Buddha’s Birthday), and I’m consumed by curiosity…I want to follow that little path sometime and see what is there; a shrine of some kind, I’m sure. Or this evening when I walked down to the neighborhood grocery store, I looked at the towering apartment buildings, the overwhelming greenery, the steep, steep curvy streets and thing, “how do I describe what a mundane trip to the grocery store is like here?” As I was walking along I saw a white bird alight in a tree. I focused on it and realized that it was some sort of parrot! A white parrot! I looked it up in my bird book – probably a yellow-crested cockatiel. The story goes that they were released in Hong Kong right before the Japanese occupation in 1941.

These are the sorts of things that make Hong Kong a magical place, but then there’s the other side, which we also experienced today. No Home Depot or Office Max here! We spent hours wandering around Wan Chai looking for towel racks. First we had to find the right street – the bathroom appliances street, NOT the kitchen appliance street, not the lighting and lamp street, not the plumbing street! Then it’s in and out of dozens of tiny shops with different bathroom sinks, showers, toilets and towel racks. And we’re trying to match the existing ones in our bathrooms which makes the task doubly arduous. We finally succeeded though, but it was very tiring, especially in the sunny, humid heat.

Now, I need the metal frames for Pendaflex file folders. I don’t know where the office supply “street” is…and I don’t know how to find it! Arggh. This is when it starts to seem so much easier to just buy the stuff in the US and ship it to HK.

So things go up and down between extreme beauty and incredible inefficiency. All and all am I content with the trade-off? Oh yes!