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!!

Little Artist

I do love to watch an artist at work so it was a real delight to arrive at Emma's the other day to find 3 1/2 year old Sophie up to her armpits in green and blue paint creating a wonderful masterpiece on a large piece of perspex... The lighting in Emma's back yard is quite beautiful, suffused through huge overhanging trees and the surrounding greenery of their very lush garden. I had a lovely time snapping away like a Japanese tourist... as you do. To see some more pics, go to Emma's Feb 07 under My Pics.



My decision to leave the country has inspired a myriad of 'we must catch up before you go's so it's a bit pack-one-meet-one at the moment... Each church I go to I join a home group that meets during the week for bible study and sharing and one such group from a few churches back (I move a lot) has become affectionately know as Ye Olde Home Group which I'm thinking might be better shortened to Ye Olde Homie. We try to catch up here and there and seeing that I'm about to leave the country we had a get together yesterday. It was well worth the long trek to Yagoona where Pete & Reg live which is truly in the middle of nowhere - I thought to myself on the way - but then having ample time to reflect upon it, I realised that it's probably more Manly that's really out-of-the-way. It was an especially good reunion this year with the addition of 2 new off-spring from various of us... Little Lana who's just 2 (and can tell you so) and wee Benjamin who's a mere 5 weeks old and so doesn't do any tricks yet other than looking very small and adorable... For more pics see the Ye Olde Homie album under My Pics.

Packing, packing...

I'm surrounded by boxes which must be a sign that I'm making progress with packing up my life (once again) and readying things for the move to Hong Kong. The pile of Will-Be-Taking is growing at an alarming rate and may have to be further sub-divided into Definitely and If-There's-Room. I've booked my plane ticket so I really am going for those who've been mislead by the whole 'hongkongmoo' thing and wondering why I'm still in the country... it's anticipatory... a sort of closing-of-one-chapter-beginning-of-another thing... So, I'll be going on March 8.

I have to say that the social calendar decidedly more full in this new chapter of my life. It's pretty special to be able to pack a box or three and then go and meet someone for lunch... I even took the Schnitzel Challenge at the Belgium Bier Cafe in Manly with a friend who wishes to remain nameless for the fact that she single-handedly ate an entire plate of pork schnitzel (quite a large one), thereby winning a shot of peach schnapps which she lovingly handed over to me, with a full-of-schnitzel look in her eyes, saying "I did it for you"... Well, halleluja! I couldn't eat all my schnitzel but I got the peach schnapps! What a friend!!

Of tea-towels and diggers...

I went round to Olivia's new place for lunch the other day. It was built in the 60's so has some wonderul classic 60's features, including 3 very distinct places in the kitchen specifically dedicated to hanging tea-towels - one of them is a special swing-out cupboard thingy wholy devoted to the tea-towel. Perhaps the lady of the house had a special collection of them? Or just required that one be at hand regardless of where it was in the kitchen she stood? Or perhaps this obvious devotion to the tea-towel was something that died out with women's lib, so we just don't quite get it.



While we marvelled at the tea-towel phenomenom, we also marvelled at the fact that boys don't need to be taught to love cars and trucks and diggers... that whole nature/nurture thing... boys and trucks is definitely nature. Case in point was when we took 4 year old Matty to the zoo last time Phil was here and he followed us round while we pointed out each new species with enthusiastic statements like "Look, a bear!", "Giraffes!", "Lions!" But nothing could compare to Matty's cry of passion when he saw the new elephant enclosure construction site... "DIGGERS!!!!!!". It eventually took three of us to ply his hands off the mesh fence in order to move on... Anyway, the pic above is Archie with his big fire truck that has a battery operated ladder that goes up and down and up and down and up... hours of fun! (For a few more pics see the Archie & Olivia album under 'My Pics')