15 days to go...

I’ll definitely miss the daily walk in to work in the morning. Of course the initial hurdle of the aroma is a little tough, but once I get past the smell of shriveled scallop at the bottom of the building, it’s a real delight.

First I skip across the road, avoiding buses and trams and soliciting all sorts of cries of admiration from the local boys delivering the seafood. Then I dip into a side alley, where lots of very tanned men with no shirts on and insane six pack abs and cigarettes hanging out of their mouths scuttle around with trolleys loaded up with boxes, like a colony of frowning ants. In this alley there is only one man who notices me usually, and he always greets me with a bellowing ‘hello’, surprising all of the other workers. He really makes me feel like I belong to this little villagey community.

At the end of the alley, past the tiny park of chirps where the oldies bring their birdies to watch them meditate, I turn into Hollywood Road, past the coffin makers. There are no dull, square angle coffins here, only curvy red wood affairs that look a little like people in the 50s imagined flying cars would look like in the future. Maybe their predictions were wrong, and the Jetsons actually shoot around in flying coffins in those cartoons…

Next up are the paper-offering sellers, but you already know everything about those thanks to Krusty’s pipe burning for gramps. By this time I am drenched, as the whole walk is up a steep hill and the humidity levels in the air are never far below 90%. By now I also start to realize why people take taxis everywhere, even for short distances, but by the next morning I’ll have forgotten again. Right when I get a little too hot and sweaty though, I get to walk past the frozen meat wholesaler, and chill out there for a second as I watch the guys lift the steaks in their heavy coats while the rest of us find a mere t-shirt too cumbersome.

The final leg of the walk is in Cat St, where there are all sorts of antiquey rubbish on sale, from mini Maos to posters of Michael Caine, from tin planes to lucky bracelets and trinkets. Maybe I’ll just have to find a reason to walk here in the morning once I have finished, to make sure that I can still get my daily fix of the Sheung Wan neighbourhood…