What Kills Us This Week!

Woke up this morning, stumbled into the bathroom and ...


... right there, outside the bathroom window, in the air-shaft! Most unexpected and not at all pleasant.

You recall how our landladies, the Frankly Frightening Fang Sisters, took down all the external walls and, because we're on the 15th floor and our place is not overlooked from anywhere, replaced them with glass so as to bring in heaps of light. We love with this aspect of our place and it's never even been remotely a problem ... until this morning.

However, let's ignore the privacy aspect of it. Let's just complain about their voices! Being honest here: no one can ever accuse Cantonese of being a pretty language and the air-shaft echoes sound and the volume is about six times higher than normal, and they keep calling out to people on the other side of the wall who are handing them out the bamboo ... and it's so incredibly vile I'm ready to go back to bed and pull a pillow over my head.

They are sweet guys however and were so nice about me taking their photograph, and I'm sure they're there for official reasons. There have been signs around the place for weeks informing us of something about to take place in the building that starts today ... but they're not in English so we never have any idea of anything going on around us.

When we first moved into the building six years ago Building Management used to, very sweetly, put up bi-lingual signs and they got us Alfred, the bi-lingual doorman, but then all the residents found out how much we paid in rent and went all "threatdown" because it turned out we were being majorly ripped off yet still thought the place was cheap, so, according to Alfred, they all got paranoid and thought their own landlords would realise how stupid we foreign devils are and that all they had to do was put in a good bathroom, a good kitchen and bigger windows and they could then charge ten times the going rate for rent. And that's when the entire building went all passive-aggressive on us and no longer catered for us in any way; thus the current mono-lingual signs AND we lost Alfred.

And, as it turned out, our fellow residents were less paranoid than prescient because they nailed it; that's indeed what's happened. Ever since we moved in, all the landlords have started doing the upgrades and hurling out the low-rent residents and, only six years later, our building is already a quarter full of Gweilos (that's Cantonese for 'Foreign Devil'). And don't the original residents hate us.

But since the Cantonese always have such lovely manners, being hated is never a problem, and we are truly blessed to have such gorgeous neighbours on this floor: the elderly widow next door; the English-speaking adulterer with a wife on the 15th floor and a mistress on the 5th; the insomniac who plays the flute from 2am to 4 am, but thankfully plays it well and softly; a packed-house of the world's only truly ugly Thai Lady-Boys; and a packed house of Mainland ladies-who-labour- in-factories, forever rushing from one job to another and so are forever exhausted, grey-faced and fainting in the lift.

When we first came to HK, I was all adamant that "I haven't come to China just to live in a Gweilo Ghetto." and insisted we live well away from Disco Bay, Repulse Bay, Sai Kung and other places where foreigners live in massive numbers, and thus we ended up in Wan Chai, 'the World of Suzie Wong', a very happy and vibrant area full of street-life. However, our world is changing and over the years we have watched our lovely area "go gentrified", with our view of the mountains a fast disappearing behind the new highrise, a population in transition, pat pongs turning into bistros, sample shops turning into boutiques, and rents going up accordingly.

These days, the Frankly Frightening Fang Sisters regularly drop by to tell us the astronomical rents being charged for the other apartments overlooking Southorn Park:

The new electric nose-hair-trimmer opposite.

But, luckily, we just signed another two-year contract on this place and they didn't do it to us THIS TIME!

So, if I'm to choose a "threatdown" for this week, it would have to be:

THREATDOWN

Frightening Landlord Sisters who are all grumpy
because they think they have done you an enormous favour
and don't know "what they were thinking"!