What's in Your Wallet?

Tuesday morning, the Middle School teachers started the day –like every week day- by meeting for staff Bible reading, meditation, and prayer at 7:25 a.m. When it came time for prayer requests, Wade shared that when he left his apartment that morning to jog to school he had his keys, phone and wallet. When he arrived at school, he had his phone and keys. No wallet.

We all moaned knowingly. Wade had already called his wife to see if by chance it had fallen out in their flat. In the midst of his tale of woe, his phone rang. It was his wife calling to say there was no sign of the wallet in the apartment.

As soon as morning devotions were done, Wade was going to start the nightmarish process of notifying the authorities, cancelling his credit cards, applying for a new i.d. card . . . you know the drill.

Then at the end of first period, the following email was waiting for us in our inboxes:

At 8:45am, as I was starting science class, I received a call that the Shatin police had received my wallet. I will be going over to pick up my wallet, intact, at lunch time. In under two hours it got to the police station. It was a good mini-lesson on prayer for my first period class. Isn't Hong Kong great!

It’s not an isolated story. My principal has lost his wallet twice in the ten years he has lived here. Both times it was returned to him with all his cash in it.

Last week in the letters-to-the-editor section of the Hong Kong newspaper an overseas traveler wrote to thank the unknown taxi driver who made sure that he got the wallet back that he had left in the backseat.

I think that I am going to make up a decoy wallet with an expired drivers license, an old library card, and a used mass transit card. I am going to strategically “lose” it at various times and locations around Hong Kong and then gage how long it takes for it to work its way back to me. It will be my own little sociological test.

In fact, maybe I’ll try it in various cities around the world –Paris, Rome, Madrid- and then rank them on their wallet-returnedness.

Jack

A couple of years ago, a friend of mine got his wallet back with everything in it except the cash. Argh.

If and when I find a wallet, not only am I going to return it with all the cash in it, but I’m going to actually double the amount of money in it. Won't the owner be happily suprised when he gets his wallets comes back with more cash in it than when he lost it.

Wouldn’t that be a nice trend if it caught on?

Understanding China 1 of 2

Unlike the west which is guilt-based, China is a shame-based culture.

Understanding China 2 of 2

In China, it is assumed that activities are not permitted unless the law specifically allows for them.

Conversely, in the West, the presumption is that all things are permitted unless the law specifically forbids them.

Up part 2 of 2

When Annika and Elise heard that we had been to the Midlevels, they were bummed out because the Midlevels lay claim to being home to the World’s Largest Escalator. So, this Sunday after church the four of us hopped the tram to the west side of The Island.

The girls were disappointed to discover that the World’s Longest Escalator is in fact not one long escalator, but rather a series of escalators. “Total rip off!” But it sure was fun going up and up and up.

(In the morning, the escalators run downwards so the residents can commute to work. At some point in the middle of the day, the escalators switch directions and run upwards until midnight.)

As we effortlessly rode the escalators up, we looked at all the shops and restaurants on either side. Since one escalator ended every few minutes and another one started, we could get off and have a look around whenever we wanted.

Because the Midlevel’s history goes back a hundred years, it is very easy to see the British influence on the architecture. Since we live in the New Territories where an apartment complex built in the mid-1980s is considered old, it was fun to see limestone buildings with arched windows and a green tile roofs.

Our goal was to take the elevators all the way up until they ended which would have taken us about half way up the mountain. But after fifteen minutes all the cool stores and shops were replaced by rather mundane apartment buildings. It also occurred to the girls that the further up we took the escalators, the further down they had to walk.

So we abandoned our endeavor, reversed directions, and walked back down to a little Middle Eastern restaurant we had seen on the way up.

One long, continuous elevator would have been really awesome; but the girls decided this had been pretty cool none-the-less.

-Jack

Up part 1 of 2

As an island, Hong Kong consists of a little bit of flat, buildable land surrounding steep mountains. Decades ago, after all the easily-accessible areas had been developed, Hong Kongers started to edge their way up the sides of one rather steep hill. Fittingly enough, this area became known as the Midlevels because its residents were living midway between the harbor and the peak. Back in the day, the only way to get up to the Midlevels was to drive the endless switch-backs that worked their way up the hillside. Today the Midlevels is a fairly tony area to live, shop, and dine.

The collection of shops and restaurants at the base of the Midlevels is known as SoHo which stands for South of Hollywood street. A couple of weeks ago, some friends and I took Julie restaurant hopping in SoHo to celebrate her birthday.

As cool as SoHo is during the day, there is something almost electrical about it at night. The lights come on and the night-time revelers come out. Patrons spill out onto the sidewalks with their overpriced drinks and the music from one bar mingles with the music from another. SoHo at night is a heady mix of westerners and Chinese, of the hip and the even-more-hip, young professional and curiosity seekers.

Book ‘Em Dann-o

Despite the fact that books are one of the heaviest things that you can pack, we brought a few along with us from the States to tie us over until we could find a good Hong Kong bookstore. Hong Kong has a couple of very good bookstores and they carry most of the titles - including new-releases- that you would find at Barnes and Nobles. The only problem is the books are expensive -about 50% more that what we would pay at Borders.

In the staff lunchroom at school is a large bookshelf with dozens of books that staff members have donated. Books are free for the borrowing; just return them when finished. It’s a great resource, but you have to be willing to work with what they have on hand. It’s very hit or miss.

I used to think that I read pretty broadly but I must say, that pulling books from the freecycle shelf has greatly expanded my reading repertoire. There have been some pleasant suprises. I must confess that I enjoyed Jodi Picoult’s “My Sister’s Keeper.” Back in The States with 100,000 titles to pick from at Barnes and Nobels, I never, ever would have picked that book of my own accord.

But courtesy of the teacher paperback exchange, I have also opened up some real duds. After 25 pages I finally gave up on a book by an Australian humorist. Between his excessive use of Aussie slang and endless local references, I had no idea what he was talking about. For a humorist, he wasn’t very humorous.

Also, Christian-romance-murder mystery: not a good sub-genre. Rule #27 of clean, efficient prose: never use “for” when you mean “because” as in “I decided to vacation in Provence, for I had never been to France.” What? Nobody talks like that; why write like that?

But, alas, I digress.

Last fall, a colleague tipped me off about Flow a used book store on The Island. I tucked that information deep in the recesses of my mind and then promptly forgot about it.

Then this past Sunday, the family and I were tramping around Hong Kong and -low and behold- there was Flow nestled above a nondescript Chinese restaurant. A person could walk past it every day for a month and never notice it. It took us a minute to figure out how to get up there (around to the right, take the stairs next to Ivan the Kozak restaurant). But once we found our way in, we were in book heaven. Flow is only half the size of my classroom. The shelves are chocked full of books. Books are stacked on the floor. Books are stacked in front of other books.

The four of us spent the next hour squeezing past other customers and browsing the over-packed shelves of Flow. The books still weren’t what I would call cheap, but for $40 we walked out with a bag full of books that should keep us busy until the end of the school year.

Now I can finally abandon Starship Troopers and begin reading the memoir by the Last British Governor of Hong Kong.

I’m glad to finally have some good books, for I love to read.

-Jack

Not Homeless, at Least Not Yet

Annika and Elise are going back to Chicago and Michigan for seven weeks this summer (fret not, they will be flying with colleagues of ours) but, Julie and I will be staying to teach summer school.

Even though we will be staying on campus next year, our current housing contract ends in the middle of June and our new housing contract does not begin until the first of August. Translation: Jack and Julie will essentially be homeless for seven weeks.

But don’t worry, we probably won’t be sleeping under a bridge. So many teachers travel during the summer months –many of them going back to their home countries of Australia or Canada or The States- that there is no shortage of apartments in need of “house-sitting.”
Everyone here is so gracious that we have had multiple offers.-Jack

A Room With a View

Typically, on-campus housing is reserved for first-year teachers and their families. But because our school has relatively low turnover going into next year, there have been rumors floating around that there might be a chance we could stay on campus. In our household, March was dominated by discussions about whether or not we would stay on campus if an apartment was available.

Moving off campus would allow us to experience a different corner of Hong Kong. It would also give us a little separation between work and home.

But if we stay on campus, the commute is really hard to beat. And the apartments the school provides are considerably larger than what we would get if we moved off campus. Plus, the on-campus housing is fully furnished. If we moved off campus, we would have to go through the effort of furnishing an apartment with everything including chairs, a sofa, a t.v., beds and a kitchen table.

Well, the word is in: the school has an apartment for us and we are staying. As a bonus, we will be moving into a three bedroom across the hall which will gives us even more room and will give the girls their own bedrooms.

Actually, three of the four families currently on our wing of the seventh floor will be staying next year. So we will be able to keep (mostly) intact the community that has developed here over the last eight months. Nice.

With three bedrooms, that means you will have plenty of privacy when you come to visit.

-Jack

picture by Elise VN

Even When They’re Broken, They Still Work

Okay my dad is driving me crazy. For the last three days he insists on referring to every set of stairs we come to as a “do-it-yourself escalator.”

“Oh hey, look girls, we get go up a do-it-yourself escalator!”

Would somebody please tell him, that’s not funny.

-Annika