25 March 2009

D-75 to D-73, water, water everywhere

Every year in this tropical country, the skies open up for months on end, making commuting miserable and bad workmanship apparent (such as our lovely leaking ceiling in the bathroom, for example). But as soon as they close up again I seem to erase them from my memory, so once again this year, I am really surprised to see so much rain. It's still nice and humid of course, so we get the immense and almost physically impossible pleasure of being hot and sticky all day, while simultaneously getting drenched...

But the rain doesn't bother me because it gets us wet (in fact as a child I used to wait for it to rain to go out and play); rather, I hate the rain because of the killer umbrellas that come out in a crazy bid to pierce my eyes out or drip all of their collected drops on to my neck.

Every year my umbrellaphobia multiplies in strength, and today at lunchtime I worked myself into a frenzy, screaming at people who got anywhere near me with their death machines, trying to stab me with their spokes.

I suppose I need to calm myself down if I am going to go ahead with my plan to convince Krusty to move to a quieter location soon - completely exhausted by the noise of jackhammers waking me up every morning, as well as motivated by recent developments on our rooftop, I have a strong desire to find a new place for us to live.

And only 30 minutes' ferry-ride away lies Lamma - an island forbidden to cars, which has a reputation of being the last Hong Kong refuge of hippies. The cliché is still more or less true (not many investment bankers here, as the last ferry leaves at 11.30pm and most of those crazy financial types like to work past midnight...) but it is also slowly changing, and it is now the only place where one can find space, greenery and peace for a very reduced rent.

Sure there are no supermarkets, but you can order you food to arrive by online delivery. Sure you have to walk up a big hill to get home, but that just means you get a better view from the top! All of this might just be a pipe dream of course, as I haven't found one single place for rent yet, but it's still a dream.

As I said though, I might have to learn to calm down and deal with the killer umbrellas if I am going to live on an island full of super calm, chilled, peaced out hippies... Wonder how they will react to my kung fu umbrella defense tactics...?

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