She’s the Man

It turns out negotiating the trains is relatively easy. Inside every train above every door is a color-coded map of the system. Worse case scenario, you get on a train going the wrong way, so you get off at the next stop and reverse directions.

The buses are a different story.

While trains can get you to the general vicinity, buses are nice because if you know what you are doing they can get you right to the door step of where you're going. There are ten train lines in Hong Kong, but there are hundreds of bus routes. But you’re going to have to crack open a very detailed pocket atlas and read some really small print in order to ride the bus.

Julie doesn’t work until noon, so she's been using her mornings to take care of business in and around the New Territories by both train and bus.

Hong Kong’s answer to CraigsList is www.AsiaExpats.com. It's a buy/sell/freecycle website that –by virtue of the fact that it is in English- caters to the relatively transient expat community in Hong Kong.

Julie has been using AsiaExpat.com and her new-found bus riding skills to acquire a few things for our home.

Friday morning before she went to work at noon, she found on AsiaExpat a woman who was leaving Hong Kong, had sold most of her bigger items, and had a bunch of small stuff she was giving away. Stop by and take what you want. It’ll be on the front porch. So first thing that morning, Julie figured out it was the 67a bus she needed and off she went. When she got there, it looked liked the family had already moved out, but sure enough, there on the front porch was a stack of free items.

Julie scored some Tupperware containers, a stack of blank CDs, two bowls, and a muffin tin. She left behind the three bottles of hard liquor -but only because they had been baking in the hot sun for who-knows-how-long.

Last week she bought a used space heater and a like-new rice cooker.

Last night we took the train together to purchase a used DVD player. We met the woman at the Ma On Shan train station. We exchanged the money and the DVD player over the turn style so that she didn’t have to pay to enter the station and we didn’t have to pay to exit it. The whole transaction only took sixty seconds and less than a dozen words, but the whole time Julie and the woman were making the exchange, I kept looking around nervously. It felt like we were conducting a shady, underworld deal.

Julie didn’t bat an eyelash.

She’s a hardened pro at this.

-Jack

Helpful note: It is not permitted in Hong Kong to bring a bicycle onto a bus or a train. But you are allowed to carry on a unicycle.