Lay Ho!

Lay ho means hello in Cantonese. I'm trying my best to learn some of the local lingo as there are times when no-one speaka-de-engrish so good. I can now say: Do you speak English?, Where is the toilet?, How do you say ________ in Chinese? and various other sundry greetings. I tried out the Do you speak English? one at the department store my first weekend here and it worked! Well, at least the lady understood what I said and then said "no" (in Cantonese). So apart from the fact that she was no help what-so-ever, I walked away feeling elated. The local shopping centre in Tuen Mun is 10 minutes away on the bus and is HUGE... encompassing what seems like blocks of shops - vaster than any Westfield I've been to. Thus it's easy to come out at some random exit and be completely and utterly and entirely and possibly hopelessly LOST. I spent the first 1/2 hour of my time trying to find the department store and going around in embarrassingly hopeless circles, past the same bemused guard, getting hot flushes of frustration and very nearly giving up, when I discovered another block of shops connected by walkway to the one that had become my no-exit labrynth and lo! department store! Then I was off, got all the things I needed and felt entirely trimphant at having conquered Tuen Mun Town Plaza...



Last Sunday after church I went to Sham Shui Po (same place as the exhibition last week) to find myself a mobile phone as mine wouldn't work with the new sim card I got... Sham Shui Po is the place for cheap electricals and I got a good deal on a phone for $800HK instead of $950 I saw it for in Tuen Mun. The streets of SSP are lined with stalls selling everything from pots and pans, electic tools, mobile phone accessories, electicals of all descriptions and etc. It's also a very poor area as far as living conditions go. Great for photography...



Yesterday I went for a good long walk with Kathryn (who's a good deal fitter than me) up a very steep hill which mercifully became flat and quiet and beautiful. The first pic at the top of this post is the view a one point looking back down... And here is me:



Today I started working on the menu and posters for the recently opened Silk Road Cafe here at Crossroads. Next I'll be doing banners and other signage and then applying the logo design to cups and other paraphernalia. I also had the privilege of visiting the kids at our little school here to photograph them all with their teacher Miss Helen who is (sadly) leaving at the end of the week. Here they are, a beautiful and multicultural bunch (who REALLY need a replacement teacher - long term - if anyone is inclined to come to Hong Kong to teach voluntarily... anyone??)



Finally, I worked out how to include video on my blog page, so here is the promised clip of Jessie doing the hoola... enjoy! Feel free to leave comments people... the comment facility should work just fine now... looking forward to hearing from you!

Hong Kong!!

Greetings from Honkers! It's my third day in and I've set up my room and feeling settled and very welcomed by everyone here at Crossroads. When I stepped in to my new home (which is the flat I stayed in when I came here last year) with Liz to greet me at the door, I suddenly felt like I'd hardly been away at all and infact that I'd just popped up the road for some milk or something.

I had a good flight with 4 (heavenly) seats to myself as it was a very unfull plane - what a luxury! I was rather surprised to exit the airport and be greeted by a decidedly wintery air. Hong Kong is having an unseasonal 'cold snap' which would actually be rather nice if I had brought my coat and other winter things such as warm socks to wear to bed. The first night was a bit hard but I'm all set now and I'm sure will be wishing it was cold again before we know it, so best to enjoy it while I can.

As it was a very late night on Thursday, I had a slow day on Friday, unpacking and catching up with friends new and old (lots of hugs) and an early night. By Saturday I felt sufficiently rested and ready to go, so it was off to the office to work on some posters for the new AIDS Life Xperience "game". See more about Life Xperience here.

Today I had a big day out on the town with Katrina (who I knew from my church in Rozelle about 4 years ago and who first told me about Crossroads). She took me to her church which meets in a Kowloon Christian school and afterwards we went to a Chinese restaurant of the Peking region and enjoyed some wonderfully tasty morsels of all kinds thanks to one of the girls there being a food person (home ec teacher) and knowing the best things to order (as well as speaking Cantonese which really helps). It was one of those long slow meals in which dishes just keep appearing to surprise you, all rotating around a great big lazy-susan with an endless supply of Chinese tea to sip... as well as great people to share it with. Wonderful!

Katrina and I then went to see a rather unusual 'exhibition' called Our Life in West Kowloon. It was an incredible eye-opener and I was suddenly quite sorry that I decided to leave my camera at home (I know, madness, but my back is a bit sore from heavy luggage and I was determined to take as little as possible thinking to myself that I have plenty of tomorrows coming up for photos)... Anyway, possibly I was able to experience it better without having a camera stuck in front of my face. Basically it was in an old crumbly 8-story building where people are living in unbelievably cramped conditions. We were taken through to a number of the small units where people have temporarily vacated for various reasons and given a real taste of their lives in this place which we all would find completely intolerable. Many are elderly, jobless, mentally ill or new migrants and the exhibition is seeking to be a voice for these voiceless and forgotten people. To put names to faces and tell their stories. On 2 of the floors, single apartments were subdivided by partitions into 7 'units' where individuals and families would each live in a space smaller than my bedroom, most of them without windows, all sharing one toilet and shower and very small kitchen. All their washing is done by hand and hung over the outside landing on prodruding 'clothes lines'. This is one of the families that lived in such conditions and here is a small extract about them:



Fung Pak Wing lives with his wife and two sons in a window-less 40 sq.ft. partitioned room, in a shared-apartment with seven other households. Fung's sons have to study on the back stairs, as they don't have a table at home and their tiny room is stifling. They either construct 'a desk' by putting one plastic chair on top of another with a pillow in between, or simply work on the steps of the back stairwell. All their homework must be finished before sunset, while there's still enough light. However, despite this harsh environment and neighbors' complaints, the two boys study diligently. In school, they are doing well, and getting great results. Only when they're set assignments involving photos or I.T. does homework become a real problem, since they have neither a camera nor a computer. So, although they hope to do well in all their subjects, this may not always be possible.

To read the rest of this story and find out more about the exhibition click here. Hong Kong is a very wealthy country but there is much poverty here and Crossroads supports many of the charities that are helping these needy people. It was a valuable experience to see this sort of poverty first-hand.

On another note, I have uploaded some of the photos I took while Tina and Phillipa were in Sydney the week b'fore last. Check them out at the 'Tina & Phil in Sydney' link under My Pics to your left. It was so fab to get a good top-up of family before I left. I've added some captions to the pics instead of writing all about it here. If you click on the first photo you can then move through them all with captions. Sorry there's no pics of HK yet. Stay tuned.. there'll be plenty to come... Also, mum said she had trouble leaving a comment. I've fiddled with some of the settings... hopefully it will be possible now. If not I'll have another go. Would love to hear from you!

So Long Farewell...

It's less than 2 hours before I have to leave for the airport to fly to Hong Kong and while mum is madly cleaning Pa's place I'm hurriedly catching up on my blog before I go. SO much to do in order to leave the country for a year. What would I do without me mudda...? eg: Are you taking your electric toothbrush? said she. Yeees... Why? said I, thinking it was safely packed in my bag. Because the base of it is here in the bathroom (which she was scrubbing to within an inch of it's life). Oh, says I. Good one mum. And so on. Managed to fit 3 bags worth of clothes into one thanks to Phillipa's fab idea of condensing everything with vacpac bags. Suck out the air with a vac and watch a huge pile become a condensed mass. Unfortunately it only reduces volume and not weight. Maybe that will be the next invention.

So, many of us enjoyed a family fiasco on Saturday to celebrate Phil's 30th birthday and to farewell me. It was the fiasco to beat all fiascos. Some of us were a little overwhelmed by the frenzie of children (namely those of us without children ourselves... eg. me and Kate)... but it was the best and most comprehensive - in terms of attendance - family gathering for quite some time and hence highly special for it's rarity among other things. We, generally speaking as a family, have certainly gone forth and multiplied. The pic above are all the little tuckers we've come forth with (except Dax who was napping... Karen and Tina's wee ones yet to join us, and David's Charlie who was in Melbourne).

One of the highlights of the fiasco was 3 year old Jessie doing her hoola-hooping (sp?)... I happened to get a rather funny (me and Tina thought) little clip of her in action which I will attempt to post on my blog but can't work out how to do it right now. Stay tuned for that. Meanwhile there's lots of photos of the family gathering for you to view... Go to the link under My Pics to your left: A Birthday and Farewell.

There's lots more to report... especially about Phillipa and family visiting from Perth and Tina and family visiting from Bellingen. Should do another album for that too... But gotta go get a plane shortly, so will be coming to you from Hong Kong next posting. Now for a wee bit of mushy stuff: thank you so much to everyone for your love and support for me going to Crossroads. Hope you will stay tuned and keep reading my blog and email me to let me know your news too. Will miss you!!