Sunday, September 19, 2010

Happily Settling into Life on Lamma

Year # 3 begins in Hong Kong.

I arrived home from my magical summer holiday with a little less than 24 hours before work began. Luckily, in my line of work, I can bank on the first full week being one without students when the school year revs up. This is normally a week of meetings, intensive planning/cleaning/decorating and getting everything in order for the first day that the kids arrive. It is a social week and it's fun to see colleagues and exchange summer adventure stories. It also resembles a cold bucket of water in the face, as full-on and fast-paced as any given week in Hong Kong, and living in a hotel room made it even more difficult for me to keep up. Another drain on my emotional stability was trying to adjust to a much more solitary routine after the tandem one that I had indulged in over the summer.... Ah, a sweet and delicious solitude, which I love and missed, laced with a tinge of bitter lonliness. Trying to focus on my multitude of work-related enthusiasms, while being heavily distracted with a keen excitement about hunting for a new home, was a bit like having dinner with Johnny Depp and Eddie Vedder simultaneously. Exhausting, and yet intensely engrossing as well.

I had decided on big change when I left my cute little Lilian Court abode in Central last June, imagining myself with more wide-open space in a village house on Lamma or Lantau Island for the fall. A week after returning to Hong Kong I found a wonderful nest on Lamma Island and made the decision that, yes, the village of Yung Shue Wan would provide a happy home-base community for me. The downfall was that I needed to wait almost 3 more weeks to move in. Patience, flexibility, creative thinking and practical problem-solving all came in very handy in this time. I lived in a small, dark, and sometimes dank, room just down Main street from the ferry pier in Yung Shue Wan.

It was a challenging start, and I had some desperately discouraging days, but as I was hoping (and have since confirmed), it was well worth the wait.

1 comment:

  1. You survived the first few weeks! And now, does it feel like home? (Or more like a sweet hotel?)
    I'm looking forward to new exciting tales of life in Hong Kong...

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