Typhoon Hagupit

I take back what I wrote about clouds. I spoke too soon. I now know that there are the sort of clouds that indicate a typhoon is cooking up a storm.

This morning, with no obvious change in the weather since yesterday, excepting the clouds which were admittedly pretty unusual, the Education and Manpower Bureau closed all nurseries and pre-schools. We knew nothing of it until the school bus failed to show so I rang the school and learnt from a recorded message that typhoon level 1 was hoisted and this could quickly become typhoon level 3 which could equally quickly turn into typhoon level 8. Goodness me, to think I had sent my children out into weather which might change. I must pay more attention to those clouds in future.

It is hard to get excited about a typhoon when the wind is still relatively light. With a pleasant breeze in the air the temperature was bearable for the first time in months. I thought it would be nice to open the windows. The neighbours’ maid was busy tying the garden furniture to the railings so I went out and fetched in the various flip-flops that were lying around in an attempt to show willing. I wondered briefly if, like the Education and Manpower Bureau, the maid knew something I didn’t so I checked the Hong Kong Observatory website.

This is what you are advised to do in the event of a tropical cyclone:

1. Complete all precautions in your home. Lock all windows and doors, fit bars into position and insert reinforced shutters and gates if they are available. Adhesive tape fixed to large window-panes in exposed positions will reduce damage by broken glass. Storm water drains should be cleared of leaves and rubbish.

2. Park your car where it is least likely to be damaged.

3. Do not stand near windows on the exposed side of your home. Move all furniture and valuables away from these areas. Make sure you have a safe place to shelter, should windows be broken.

Perhaps I wouldn’t open the windows after all.

We were out of milk and bread for the children’s supper so I nipped up to our local shop only to discover that everybody else had had the same idea. I returned with a full trolley of stuff we didn’t need but siege mentality had hit Shouson Hill and struggles for the last carton of milk were in danger of breaking out in the aisles of 'Parknshop'.

Malcolm phoned at 5.45pm saying he’d been queuing for a taxi for the last 20 minutes and nothing was moving. “I’ll come and get you Darling!” I warbled and grabbed my keys. At 6pm sitting in solid traffic before the entrance to the Aberdeen Tunnel, the Flying Sofa buffeted from side to side and the windscreen wipers going full pelt, the HK Observatory hoisted level 8 and I wondered if offering to collect Malcolm had been such a good idea. It took me an hour to reach him and the woman in the queue ahead of him was still waiting for her taxi as we drove off. When we got home, Malcolm surreptitiously stacked the garden chairs and tucked them into a corner.

Hagupit bore down upon Hong Kong like some furious giant late that evening. Fortunately, because our windows held firm and our garden furniture did not take the opportunity to fly away, we got a good night’s sleep. The next day, although the worst was over, there was a lot of rain and again no school for any of the children. Malcolm called from the taxi on the way to work (no day off for him) to say, “It’s carnage out here!”

Bands of blue-overalled workers armed with chainsaws were busy clearing the thickest branches and tree trunks from the roads while others in pointed straw hats swept the leaves and debris into piles along the gutters. Later in the day we noticed that our neighbours’ tree had fallen over. What a shame they hadn’t thought to tie that down as well.

Victoria Sponge

In England when you wake up to cloudless skies you tend to rejoice at the advent of a sunny day. Sometimes it clouds over by breakfast time but on those rare occasions the blue wash wins through it is heaven. Here I am starting to feel oppressed at the sight of another cloudless sky. Don’t they have clouds in Asia? Only pollution clouds it seems; that would account for the hazy grey smog which ensures the sky is not quite blue after all.

I made a cake; a Victoria Sponge. It was a feeble attempt to make my shiny marble walled property developer’s kitchen seem more warm and homely.

It’s funny how so much of the colonised world was named Victoria. Here in Hong Kong we have Victoria Harbour, Victoria Peak, Victoria Park and Victoria City although no-one ever refers to it as that and most people have indeed forgotten the former colonial capital’s name. Did colonial settlers call places after their sovereign when they were desperately missing home? Or were they showing off? And did their wives bake Victoria Sponges to recreate a piece of England and evoke memories of tea in summer gardens? Or were they showing off?

Perhaps I should have made a different cake and called it the Putney Sponge. I could ice it with low flying aeroplanes and have the children make the sound effects.

It strikes me that we have very few outside sounds and certainly no aeroplanes. So used are we to living in a hermetically sealed box to keep out the mosquitoes and the heat that we hear nothing of the roaring city below. If I lean over our front deck and crane my head to the right I can just see a small triangle of water through a gap in the skyscrapers. I think it’s Aberdeen Harbour, named by homesick Scots I presume. When we arrived here, I was slightly put out to find we had no sea view. So much of residential Hong Kong is built facing the water and half way up a steep hill that it seemed something of an achievement to have found a house with no sea view.

Instead we look out on the towers of Aberdeen, the roof-tops (complete with satellite dishes and air-conditioners) of neighbouring apartments and the wonders of Ocean Park. There is a large multi-coloured balloon which floats up and down throughout the day much to the children’s delight, the panda house and the cable car which transports visitors up over the opposite hill, past the giant green sea horse to the dolphins and roller coasters on the other side. A large bird of prey is circling before my window and there is a surprising amount of green, far more than in London where, if I hung at an extraordinary angle from one top floor window I could just see Putney Common.

We forgot to eat the Victoria Sponge. The kitchen is too warm already and the cake didn’t make it a jot more homely. Perhaps the children don’t need reminders of home. They appear to be settling far more readily and quickly than I am. Each morning my four year old declares with the unbridled enthusiasm of the young, “Mummy, it’s a lovely day!” Who am I to burst his bubble?

Mad Dogs and Englishmen

Sunday mornings are spent at Valley Fort RFC in Stanley. Here on the site of the old British Army barracks on a vast open playing field the entire ex-patriot community of Hong Kong's rugby playing nations, Brits, French, Americans, Canadians and Australians, join together to see their offspring knocked into shape and shouted at for being off-side.

By a quarter to ten the normally quiet road leading to the Fort is packed with cars, bumper to bumper, all heading for the extraordinary phenomenon that is the RFC. At the gate each driver is required to stop and produce HK ID while our registration number is noted down by a soldier with a clipboard. That done, we are waved through by pairs of white-gloved PLA soldiers who employ the most mesmerising, mechanical hand signals to point us on our way. Evenly spaced along the road to make sure we don’t take a wrong turn, they are like automated mannequins, wound like clockwork dolls in anticipation of the Sunday morning influx. Giggling is quite inappropriate in the light of their stern soldierly faces and yet I love this waving-on ritual so much I’d happily reverse the car and join the back of the queue way down Wong Ma Kok Road just to see it all again.

In a stately manner befitting our surroundings, the file of cars processes past soldiers’ quarters from a bygone age to a vast tarmac car park where we unload water, picnic rugs and rations from the boots of our cars and proceed to the field. Here in temperatures exceeding 33 degrees boys of all shapes and sizes, and even a few girls, charge around for up to two hours in thick nylon kit to the exhortations of too many amateur coaches. Fathers watch and photograph their offspring reliving vicariously their own sporting youths while mothers cling to the shady edges with siblings too young to play. One woman does yoga headstands under a tree, others walk their dogs. I tend to wonder what on earth we are doing there.

My boys have joined their under 10s, under 8s and under 5s teams with gusto and, having bemoaned the loss of space for them to kick a ball, who am I to complain at this weekly opportunity to get it out of their systems? Never mind they return with scratched faces and squashed heads, red with exertion and sunburnt to a crisp; it’s all jolly good fun and proof, if ever any were needed, that only mad dogs and Englishmen, and their sons of course, go out in the midday sun.

Mid-Autumn Festival

A note came home from a teacher on Friday requesting photos of the children enjoying the festive events of the weekend to send into school the following week. Peacefully unaware of any imminent festivities I was grateful to the internet for filling the gaping holes in our local knowledge and thus a festive programme of events was quickly drawn up.

A legend dating from 1880 relates how one stormy night the villagers of Tai Hang killed a serpent only to discover that the dead body of the serpent had vanished the next morning. Days later, a plague broke out in Tai Hang and many people died. A village elder saw Buddha in a dream and was told to perform a Fire Dragon Dance and to burn fire crackers in the Mid-Autumn Festival. The sulphur in the fire crackers drove away the plague and the villagers were saved. Ever since then, the residents of Tai Hang have performed their Fire Dragon Dance for three nights during the Mid-Autumn Festival to commemorate the event

We made our way to Tai Hang and, at the end of a narrow road in an atypical low-rise part of town, we found roads partitioned off and lined with expectant crowds. The children pushed their way to the front, courtesy of their magical blonde hair while Malcolm and I, lacking the charm of youth but enjoying Caucasian height, bobbed around at the back.

The advent of the dragon was announced by huge lanterns held over the street on poles. These were closely followed by a cluster of little Chinese girls dressed in pink and gold satin pyjamas and carrying lanterns in the shape of lotus flowers. Next, to our considerable delight, came that obvious symbol of Chinese cultural history, the bagpipe band. The Chinese “Red Tartans” marched back and forth piping traditional airs in full ornamental Highland dress. Our giggles were stifled only when a concerned bystander reminded us that Hong Kong had after all been a British colony for many years. Of course, what better reason to don kilts, white leather buttoned spats and bearskins in temperatures of 33 degrees plus?

And suddenly the dragon was upon us; bounding from side to side, swaying his huge tail and flinging sparks from his incense stick spines into the awestruck crowd. Bourne aloft by 40 or 50 young men, he lurched right past us, down a barely lit side street and then returned, affording us an excellent view and a good covering of ash. And then he was gone; a shy fantastical creature that had appeared, performed his party piece and retired to his lair.

The following night was Chung Chiu or the Moon Festival which takes place every year on the 15th night of the 8th lunar month. According to one story the Mid-Autumn Festival commemorates a 14th Century uprising against the Mongol rulers. In a cunning plan, the rebels wrote the call to revolt on pieces of paper and embedded them in cakes that they smuggled to compatriots inside a besieged city. The lotus seed paste cakes were not eaten by the Mongols and thus the emperor-to-be was able to take the city and the throne.

We headed for Victoria Park in Causeway Bay to enjoy the festivities. Buying moon cakes to eat under the bright mid-autumn harvest moon was easier said than done. I assumed they’d be on sale everywhere but a desperate search for a bakery in the streets around Causeway Bay revealed the weak link in my plan. Dejectedly I queued at the 7-11 store and asked one last time if they knew of anywhere I could find moon cakes. Having surmounted the usual interpretation issues, the face of the sales assistant lit up and she bustled off, returning minutes later with a boxed gift set of moon cakes, entitled “Bold Knights of Disney”. Too tired to question whether Mickey Mouse Moon Cakes really were traditional and not wanting to disappoint the kind lady who had just unearthed the last four moon cakes in Hong Kong I handed over the cash and went to find the others.

Victoria Park was awash with 2 million Chinese doing what you do at the Mid-Autumn Festival – wandering about and enjoying the stage shows and the coloured lantern displays while eating popcorn and ice cream and waving luminous neon light sticks. So much for my romantic notion of picnicking on moon cakes with our traditional paper lanterns. No one was vaguely interested in the moon. Our paper lanterns lasted minutes at most and each of the children took one bite of the oily lotus seed paste cake before spitting it out in disgust.

So we bought neon light sticks for the children and gave the remaining cakes to the Shouson Hill Road porters on our return. Let’s hope they didn’t share the Mongols’ and our opinion that they really weren’t worth eating, and that the strictly non-traditional Mickey Mouse design on the top of the cakes went unnoticed.

Back to School

School started a day late for the older boys on Tuesday 27th August as the previous week’s level 8 typhoon had set everything back by a day.

We took a taxi, leaving home at 7.10am in order to arrive by 7.30. This should have allowed us plenty of time but everyone had had the same idea of dropping their little angels off in person on the first day and so the tail-back from the German Swiss International School reached some way back down the Peak Road.

On arrival wehot-footed it to the Junior Library where the boys were whisked away to their new classrooms to meet their teachers leaving a number of ex-pat families looking dazed, confused and very tired by the early morning start. Introductions followed, mutual friends and coincidences were established and a group of us left, conversation now flowing, to go and have coffee. Just like Putney then.

By the end of the first week the boys seemed happy and settled enough in their new environment to travel on the school bus. It means an even earlier start for us all as the GSIS bus picks them up at the drive entrance of our house at 6.45am. They don’t have uniform; no shirt buttons, no ties to tie, nor blazers to hunt for and thus far have worn shorts, T-shirts and sandals every day, so getting dressed is at least relatively quick.

The afternoons are a different kettle of fish, however. School officially ends at 12.30pm and, in a simple world, the boys would arrive home for lunch soon after 1pm. But no, for the school offers a myriad of Extra Curricular Activities (ECAs which are free) and Afternoon Activities (AAs which are not). There is everything from Chinese Calligraphy to Scuba Diving on offer and most of the activities take place on the school campus. At first glance the wonderful shopping basket of options looks like a simple and convenient way for Mum to extend the school day for her action-hungry boys. I couldn’t have been more wrong.

The boys can now arrive home at any time between 1pm and 4pm on one of three different buses. If their activities end at 2pm there is no school bus and they need collecting. On only one day do they both finish at the same time, 2pm of course, so I am required to rush out of the house at 1.45 to collect them just as the little ones should be settling down to sleep.

The other consequence of the frenzied afternoon timetable is that we have unwittingly introduced into our morning routine the frantic hunt for tennis racquets, table tennis bat and balls, shin pads, hockey sticks, karate gi, trumpet, riding kit, sandwiches for lunch, trainers, Chinese, Science or German books (Year 5 has extra lessons in these subjects on two afternoons) snacks, swimming towels and water bottles. You’d need a degree in logistics to be on top of this lot and my attempts to master it have resulted in a huge spreadsheet on the kitchen pin board showing when, who, what and where, kit required and bus/collection time. Once the boys have gone I am left feeling physically drained and anxious about whatever they’ve forgotten and
generally in need of another two hours in bed.