Summer in Hong Kong, Lyndhurst Terrace

Summer has arrived in Hong Kong, as demonstrated by two things. Firstly, people are now happily, if obliviously, sitting eating lunch on Wyndham Street on restaurants facing the street, without any glass or other barrier between them and the funk of chemicals being pumped out by every taxi, idling delivery truck and growling Lamborghini that rumbles along the street. Secondly, it's now so hot that just walking up Lyndhurst Terrace and back down Wyndham left me with a half-transparent shirt.

Lovely.
I was more perturbed than usual to be walking up and down Lyndhurst Terrace, not just because of the heat, or of the crowds of people who blithely mill about on the pavement without ever going anywhere apart from directly-in-the-way-of-where-you-want-to-step, but because I was carrying the wrong lunch.

I'd gone to a bagel shop on Lyndhurst Terrace that never seems to have any customers, and ordered a bagel.  It's strange that the shop has survived for as long as it has (at least five months) because it never seems to have anyone in it apart from me and five members of staff.  It was rather peculiar to see another customer in there at the same time as me.  I paid this illusory figure no mind, and read the SCMP to cheer myself up instead.  As much as stories about the oil slick off the coast of the US, and people dying outside hospitals can cheer you up, that is.

Then I walked back to my desk, sweating profusely and cursing the world around me, and I'd been in a bad mood then, how much worse was it when I opened the bag and discovered not a bagel chock-ful of avocado and asparagus, but a small cardboard box full of string beans and chicken.

Enraged by this singular lack of attention to detail, I hauled myself back to Lyndhurst Terrace and the bagel shop, where they were already waiting guiltily for me with the correct order.  The one time that I go there and there's another customer, and they manage to muddle up our orders.

Luckily, I'd cheated the system - I'd taken a mouthful from the cardboard box, and not paid for it, and I still got to eat my bagel.  Which seemed to be full of celery rather than asparagus.  And I think I ate a piece of chicken by mistake (I mistook it for artichoke). 

So maybe I'm not entirely up on the deal.  And I've eaten meat again, which might mean I have to hand in my vegetarian card and subsist on nothing but hotdogs and burgers for the rest of my life.

But it's not all bad news; now that it's warm again in town, I look forward to arriving in Central drenched in sweat, staggering off the tram and then almost collapsing when I walk into the frigid environment that is the Landmark, and suffering a second time from temperature shock when I walk out of the Landmark and back into the heat to cross the street.  That has to be good exercise for my cardiovascular system, surely?

Three days to the Hong Kong Dog Rescue Comedython, and I have two canine-themed jokes.  Only one of which involves bestiality.  It's going to be a long ten minutes...