More pics from the hood

Sick of acting like a beached whale on the sofa, in need of some exercise and entertainment, I went for a quick spin around our neighbourhood today - next time I'm bringing the good camera! I saw:

The butcher (who needs a countertop when you've got the floor?)


The locksmith (who needs a door when you're selling keys?!)


The plumber (who doesn't seem too keen on order)


The estate agent (who is much more keen on order)


The dry cleaner (who somehow doesn't seem too keen on cleanliness, although, check out the gloves...)


The lingerie shop (who needs Agent Provocateur?)


The chemist (who needs Western medicine when you've got dried gecko?)


The, ermm, box shop (who knows what's inside)


And finally, the enigmatic Dragon World (do they sell dragons?) and... another butcher, taking his piggies for a walk.



Who needs TV when you live in Sheung Wan?!

N-Oedipus

I woke up crying this morning. Literally sobbing, with heaving shoulders and soaking pillow, from a violently vivid dream in which Krusty had died and I had to embalm him... It was horrifying.

Well actually, if you want the whole story, I was embalming him to a very, very sad song by Damien Rice that we often listen to, and then, in my dream, I suddenly say to everyone "we shouldn't be sad, we should remember Krusty the way he was and dance the way he used to dance." At which point we all stood up to emulate his trademark snakehips/epileptic moves. And then I realised how impossible my husband would be to replace. And woke up in a crying fit.

I have read that these dreams are quite common (well, I'm not sure about the embalming part) as the birth gets closer, but I don't know if I can go through that again. Of course it could be that bambino is sending me signals to get rid of the man who keeps laying his head on my belly and (for some reason) singing the Scoobidoo theme tune over and over again. Or it could be my darling son and his early Oedipus complex telling me to get rid of Daddy so that we can be just the two of us forever.

Or it could just be me being, as Krusty often calls me, "Needypuss" and needing more attention now than ever.

In any case, I now know what my worst nightmare is...

A new member of the family

Our gecko has had a baby! OK, I can't really check its DNA nor ask it who its mummy is, but it's tiny and cute and very agile... It even stayed in the sink the whole time I was doing the washing up (again, this might be because it was scared stiff rather than keen to take part in chores, but hey, I'm allowed to dream)...

Trapped

My delicious period of maternity leave began on Monday, and I couldn't wait to get all Nigella Lawson on Krusty's ass. My plans of a sparkling home smelling of freshly baked cupcakes were soon scuppered though, as I flicked through the news channels before heading out for ingredients, and report after report of lethal levels of air pollution in Hong Kong urged me not to leave the house unless strictly necessary.

The levels are recorded on a scale from 0 to 500, with figures of just 200 classified as "severe". Anything higher than that is considered dangerous to human beings, although my guess is that Hong Kong has a habit of exceeding it.

Anyway, on this particular day, by the time I was ready to run out to buy my baking soda, the levels had already hit 400; the news had hit international media, children were being forbidden from playing outdoors, and Krusty, on the 58th floor of the ifc, couldn't see anything through the smog out of his window.

By 9pm, the scale had hit 500, the highest reading since 1989. And no, that doesn't mean this has happened before - 1989 is when they actually created the index to start recording pollution levels... Not only that, but the readings can go no higher, even if the levels can. So chances are the levels, which were apparently due to a "sandstorm" in Beijing, were closer to the thousand mark...

So, on my first day of freedom, I was stuck inside my gilded cage, with only the sound of drills and jackhammers to keep me company. And I had nothing to cook with, so Krusty ended up coming home to an improvised ratatouille/bolognaise sheperd's pie with parmesan that he called "interesting" about 15 times.

Thankfully since then the levels have dropped somewhat, and I have been able to leave the house. All of the baby shopping is done, or almost, and so all I have to do now is find suitable activities to wait for bambino (I see a lot of knitting in my future).

Let's just hope I don't have to wait entirely indoors for the big day to come...

Our latest meeting with bambino

Apparently bambino is wayyyy too comfortable using my placenta as a pillow to turn his head down, something which he should have done by now... And something that prevents a good 3d scan - our second attempt was compromised by his position too. In fact, I can't remember one single scan when the doctor didn't say "he's in the wrong position to see properly". I guess you can't tell a tiger what to do... (And what is that he is holding?! Has he built himself a cuddly toy?)

Macgyver opens a photo studio

With the help of a bit of string, some sellotape and... a Stella Artois umbrella (!), Krusty Macgyver has managed to rustle up a photostudio at home... Is there no limit to what this man can build?!

Wake-up call

One more of the many things that make me love Krusty more and more is his beautiful singing voice.

If you have never heard this voice, let's just say he's not going to win American Idol anytime soon, but the great thing is that he doesn't care. The fact that every time he sings a tune it sounds like a hundred cats being swung against a wall does not make him shy for one second, and very often he wakes me up in the morning with an improvised ditty – he is also a master songwriter, and likes to repurpose the classics to fit his whim. Take this example from this morning, sung bright and early and at high volume (don't let the lyrics mislead you, the tune was not necessarily recognisable):

"ray a deer a female deahhhhr, doe a drop of golden shuunnn, fah a name I call my self, fah a long long way to run, fahhhhh a needle pulling thread, fahh a drink with jam and breaddd.... which brings us back to meeeee"

Adrenaline crash

In the run-up to maternity leave, I have noticed one marked difference in my work routine – when stressful situations and deadlines arose in the past, I used to transform into a superwoman working machine, getting everything done in record time, with record energy and motivation. But now that I can't sit as closely to my keyboard as I used to, I suddenly find myself crumbling under the stress, wanting instead to curl up in a comfy corner somewhere to ignore the pressure rather than rise to the challenge.

I have gone from superwoman to village idiot in the space of just a few months.

To which Krusty quipped: "Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's just some weirdo in gold shoes"

A tour of the neighbourhood

This is an extremely successful shop in our neighbourhood:


That's right. It's not a supermarket in communist Russia, it's not a warehouse in Africa... It's one of the most popular dried seafood outlets on our street. And this is actually the shopfront - no door, no shelves, nothing apparently on sale... All is not what it seems.

And if you never believed me when I told you about traffic, jackhammers and lorries in our street, rejoice! For Google Street has now landed in HK. Now you can visit us without even leaving your lounge. Come take a tour of our neighbourhood...

Relapse

Have been coughing all day again, lungs burning, head throbbing. Thought I'd got rid of the bug, but Krusty reckons I've caught a second one that was going around his office.

Not impressed.

The N word

The lady working next to me in the office is a very energetic woman who likes to stand up when she is on the phone, her voice therefore travelling across the entire row of desks.

That would be fine (if a little annoying), but it gets rather, let's say, interesting to listen to sometimes – this lady takes care of our business in Mainland China, and her projectile sales pitches are often made in Mandarin. Of course I don't speak a word of Mandarin, so imagine my surprise when her entire conversation is peppered with the word "nigger".

Apparently this word, in Chinese, means simply "that" – a word that, as you can imagine, is used quite liberally in everyday language. Not to mention that when she is stuck for a word, where I would say "erm, erm, erm", she actually says "something something nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger something nigger".

And when she wants to talk about "that gift". Well, that's "gay nigger".

As I said, interesting...!

Taxi times, opus x

I have said it many times before - one of my favourite things about the taxi ride to work is the variety of cabs (and drivers) that exist in Hong Kong.

The outer shells might all look identical (96% of all HK taxis are bright red Toyota Comforts) but inside it's always a surprise. You could have the driver with 5 mobile phones, operating a call centre from his office on the road. You could have the super religious driver with shiny charms and gri-gris hanging from every available hook or handle. Or, like I did this morning, you could have the cartoon character enthusiast and his no-holds-barred approach to sticker art...

The biggest surprise, though, was this driver's personality. As I got into this shrine to Mickey and friends, wondering how the guy could see through the sea of plush Pokemons in the front window, I realised that his attitude didn't exactly reflect the sugary world he was surrounded by - he was one of the angriest drivers I have ever had, hurling insults at every other taxi in sight, explaining to me that the way I wanted to go took too long and so zooming down another way (only to add 20 minutes to my journey...) and then grumbling because the traffic was bad...

It goes to show - just because Hello Kitty has thrown up all over your place of work, doesn't mean you have to smile and sing "It's a small world after all" about it...

How to get rich

While researching the Hong Kong property for an article I am writing today, I came across a (sadly) typically HK fact of real estate life. In fact I came across hundreds of crunchy tidbits of property ridiculousness, but one sticks in my mind more than others.

I am sure this has been denounced a million times: last October, a mainland Chinese investor broke global real estate records when he bought an apartment in Hong Kong for US$57m, or around US$9,000/square foot.

So far, so "Hong Kong is expensive, what else is new?"

Well, the developers of the 46-floor building in question, to make sure that the penthouse would rake in maximum dollars, cut out a total of 42 intermediate floors – 14, 24, 34, 64 and all floors between 40-59– to make sure that the penthouse would be on level 88, a most auspicious number in Chinese culture, where 8 rules. How convenient! Now I had heard of not having a 13th floor sometimes (unlucky in Europe), and when I lived here in the nineties, we were on the 5th floor, which if you counted would actually have been the 4th (a very unlucky number in Chinese culture, as the number 4 sounds eerily similar to the word "death" in Cantonese), but cutting out 42 floors?!

To which information Krusty, ever the entrepreneur, reacted by suggesting that we repaint our own lift immediately to indicate that instead of the 16th floor, we are actually living on level 888, higher even than the world's tallest building. We could then invite unsuspecting tourists to visit our rooftops and give them oxygen masks to simulate the feeling of loftiness. We are going to be rich!

Then, Krusty continued, why not just cut out the middle man on our road to fortune, and directly pencil in some zeros on to our bank statements? We're going to be millionaires! Billionaires! Well, as long as you don't count the millions of dollars missing between our current balance and the ones I'm going to write on to my latest account printout...

Highway to health

I must be feeling better, because Krusty put the moan count up to three within just 30 minutes of me waking up this morning (he was quite enjoying the flu-induced nag-free zone), the most significant of which included me explaining why getting dressed was simply impossible - my body has turned into to one of those wibble wobble dolls, and anything I wear seems to point out the fact that my derriere has decided to generously round out the angles of my bump.

In any case, I can't possibly spend another day in bed, so I am back in the office and (almost) glad of it - the weather is absolutely perfect at the moment, and it's (almost) a pleasure to get up and experience the mild breeze, soft sunshine and relatively low pollution index. It (almost) makes me fall in love with dried seafood street again... Although the upcoming rise in temperatures, humidity and therefore smells will soon sort that out.

But that's not the only reason I'm whistling this morning - the taxi ride to work, usually such a chore due to ridiculous congestion on the highway, has been cut in half due to a new road cutting through a huge patch of recently reclaimed land.

It has been so surreal to watch this road on water appear. When we arrived in Hong Kong, two years ago, I took Krusty to the waterfront near his office, telling him the stories of my teenage years spent drinking cheap beer beside the sea. But all of those steps and memories have disappeared. We gradually watched the water get filled in, until now the seafront has advanced hundreds of metres towards Kowloon. (On the picture, the harbour I used to know started to the right of the huge road you can see on the right)

Of course, this new land had been "sold" to the people as an opportunity to create a green, cultural space with a promenade and sculpture parks, but in true Hong Kong fashion, there is now a five lane motorway there, with a series of shopping malls no doubt to follow.

But as I said, who am I to complain - this blight on Victoria harbour's landscape cuts my journey in half. So, bravo landfill.

Hold on, that sounded like the opposite of a moan. Am I getting sick again?