Thursday, April 14, 2005

Crazy stuff

I don't know what's happened in the last week but there's been an explosion in insanity at home. Here are three of the most bizarre incidents:

1. Two nights ago there was a fight between the belt seller and the begging monk. I heard yelling late at night and I went in the bathroom to look out the window. Both of them had assumed karate poses and were flailing their arms around. The belt seller then grabbed the beads around the monk's neck and the two started to hit each other. A large crowd had gathered, including a bunch of tourists who probably expected this kind of wacky thing to happen in Hong Kong. Luckily, someone pulled the monk away before there was any serious damage. When I asked Daisy about it the next day she said that everyone knows that monk is a fake.

2. Last night I was in the market when an old Nepali woman picked up a large mango and threatened to throw it at the stallholder she was bargaining with. The stallholder than began to scream profanities and the Nepali woman responded by yelling 'death to all your family' repeatedly. I wasn't sure if I was more shocked by what she said or by the fact that she spoke such good Cantonese.

3. Jacky who lives in the alley below, has lately taken to believing that he is a large cat. He alternates between being a tiger and what he calls a 'meihgwok pao'. It means 'American big cat' so I can only assume it means puma or cougar or something like that. He moves around with great stealth, calls his house the 'cat home' and does a lot of roaring. He's very good at the roaring and I've lain in bed the last few nights listening to him roaring on the street below, sometimes followed by the scream of a terrorised pedestrian.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

oh, those ARE bizarre alright. But for me, the 3rd one takes the cake for bizarreness. Yeah "pao" is one of the big cats. If i'm not wrong, it refers to a leopard.

Anonymous said...

I wondered if pao is just a general term because Jacky seems to preface it with different words to mean different kind of big cats. Can anyone confirm?