I love Hong Kong. I would wander around the island all day in a cosy nostalgic blur if I didn't have 8 Indonesian corporates to escort from one Grand Hyatt room to another or copious requests from demanding clients to deal with all hours of the day. But Hong Kong taxi drivers are a different thing altogether. Man alive are they rude. I can only recall two taxi journeys made on this trip. There were three, but the one back to the airport on Friday afternoon completely passed me by as I slouched in the back seat comotose. Otherwise it was a 100% hit rate of abuse. I made the mistake of taking the suicide seat on both occasions and caught the full frontal when on the first trip the driver inexplicably started yelling at me 100 yards before we reached our destination that we were nearly there and practically shoved me out of the car when we arrived. Then on my next ride I asked in my fluent Cantonese for a receipt before politely trying to ascertain whether there was a more accurate word to use than the restaurant bill I had probably demanded. Well the guy just flipped. Talk about a torrent of abuse. I was called everything under the sun as I scrambled out onto the street side and with the aid of that funny contraption that only HK taxis seem to have, the driver slammed the door shut behind me. My companions and I stood on the roadside in the drizzling rain in bemused silence when the door opened again and with a clatter a blue and yellow CLSA wooden sign post we had helped ourselves to from that evenings entertainment venue was hurled onto the road at our feet. Maybe it loses something in translation. It was all just a little surreal. I love Hong Kong.
I blew it though didn't I? I had been so self disciplined. I hope you got your email summaries from me written with the utmost professionalism at all hours of the day and night. But you have yet to hear about day 4, which already seems a lifetime ago. That is because Thursday evening was taken up by an early departure for Po Toi, followed by drinks in the Armani Bar, an altercation with a taxi driver and far too many hours in various bars. It’s pathetic really. And you may say that I have should have addressed Day 4 at the start of this week, but it has been a trying one involving a brief unscheduled and unwanted visit from Hen who was sent home from school for a couple of days. ‘Nuff said really. Admittedly the distracting boyfriend is, according to Hen, going to be an internationally renowned rock star in due course and so obviously is quite a catch, but at the moment I am trying to impress on her the need to focus a little more wholeheartedly on academic matters. By way of punishment for her untoward behaviour I took her on a 45 minute cross country run, set her to work shoveling copious amounts of horse manure off two large fields and made her write a 1,000 word essay entitled “In an Ideal World”. I can’t resist including one small extract…..which is a sentence at the end of a paragraph on animals which concluded “If you wanted an animal, they would not cost anything, and their poo would evaporate as soon as it comes out.”
So where were we….?
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