Up The Hill

I had my bag with me.  I brought a large than usual bag this time.  My friend is nervous.  We are late to get to a meeting which he has set up.  He wants to go swiftly.  I have a bag.  I suggest a cab.  He insists that the MTR will be quicker.  I capitulate. 

The MTR with a big bag is a drag. We’re going to IFC at Central which is one line, straight across.  But the Central station is huge.  This means we need to walk all the way over to the IFC where the Airport Express station is located.  “No.  Really, it’s no big deal.” I insist.  My foot is starting to ache and I know exactly how much further we have to go. The escalator to another escalator and then outside to the pavilion. 

The IFC pavilion is full of Hong Kong bankers just off work, milling about, pints in hand.  My friend walks briskly into the bar, passing through people with drinks searching for his friend.  Reluctantly, disgruntledly, I plot my way forward with my luggage in-tow, looking rather out of place with this posh apres work finance folk.   Most of the people are European and some how I wax twice as pugnacious under the gaze of their judgmental, rolling eyes.  “Fuck yourself” is a gob of phlegm I’m ready to pass to the floor. 

We all share a drink and a pleasant chat but now its time to move again.  Where to go?  I am set upon dumping this bag at the hotel, which is over in my old neighborhood of Pok Fu Lam.  It’s not close, but I don’t care.  What I do care about is that the cab queue in the basement of the Airport Express Station has what appears to be a forty-minute wait.  OK.  Let’s find a restaurant then. 

We both know the restaurant selection up beyond Hollywood road along the escalator will start to get interesting.  We walk from the IFC to the base of the escalator, up some steps, across a walkway or two in order to find that for the first time either of us can remember, the escalator is, out of service.  OK.  I’m not pulling this thing any further.

But in the back of my mind I know we need to rendezvous with another colleague at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club.  I’d assumed we could walk over from a parallel position.  A cab two blocks up would be silly.  Let’s just find something here.   We descend from the escalator and stare up the steep incline.  All the restaurants I recall are up there; up the hill.   My friend feels guilty and begins searching on line.  “There’s a German place that’s up the that way.”  I’m imagining pig’s knuckles.  “How far?  Wait, what about this one, right here?”  Upon closer look it appears rather compromised.  We duck in a burrito joint and I quickly duck us right back out the way we came when I see what they propose to stuff the burritos with.  Once again I look at the stairs to Hollywood Road.  May as well. 

The steps are such that there is no other way to proceed but to carry the bag.  Each step is grinding until we reach the summit at Hollywood Road.  The familiar street, curves around the old Victoria prison and, as it is 7:00PM on a Friday so the streets are packed with glittering people.  My friend has bounded ahead and I pause to wait for him in front of an open-door bar that is alight with inebriated activity.  I feel as if I don’t want to take one more step in search of anything.  Where is he?  I am not going to search for him.  I wait and wait until finally he swings back.  I suggest the place I’ve spied, two doors down, whatever the hell it is, and we descend down in to a tapas place, which will have to do.

Friday, 11/03/17