Urban Survival Skills

In the city, it’s survival by any means necessary.

We are still adding to our set of urban survival skills.

Last Sunday, we had the name of a church we and our friends wanted to visit and we’d even managed to figure out what bus we needed. Go us! We’d been told that the bus would drop us of fairly close to the church. (Experience told us it would not look anything like a tradition church, but would probably be inside one of Hong Kong’s innumerable, non-descript office buildings.)

So far, so good.

The second we stepped off the bus though, we realized that the piece of information we were missing was how to get from the bus stop to the church. The four of us –and our kids- stood their nonplussed. Shoot. What do we do now? Then our friend’s wife said under her breath, “Hey, look” and she nodded discreetly at a group of five or six Asians and Anglos walking by. They were well scrubbed and slightly better dressed than your average Hong Konger at 9:10 on a Sunday morning. A couple of them were carrying canvas book bags.

We shrugged. It was as good a plan as any. We fell into line behind them and started following them like lost puppies. I hope this works, otherwise we going to end up in a really weird part of Hong Kong.

Less than a minute later, our unwitting leaders lead us into the lobby of a glass skyscraper.

And sure enough, there in the lobby was a sign for Island ECC and on either side of the elevator were two smiling women wearing “greeter” tags. Church was on the second floor. Overflow with video feed was on the third floor. Sunday school for the kids was on the sixth floor.

You don’t need to know everything. You just need to know how to get by with what you do know.

-Jack