Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Back In K-Town

So after a week back in the lala land of the north I feel like I have ruefully re-acclimatised to the spiritual atmosphere here. Like globs of mayo on the sandwich of life this town saturates my spiritual arteries with its insipid life messages and self promoting ad slogans. The familiarity bred over the years has formed a conduit that means I must constantly be on guard or slip down the slope into a generally cynical point of view. This is not to say that Hong Kong is a spiritual oasis, far from it. Kelowna is only a microcosm of Hong Kong's insanity. The familiarity is the key. You know what they say about familiarity.
I am filled with an anticipation for what lies ahead though, daunting as it is. We have a lot of money to put together in a short time to cover the costs of getting our family over to HK and set up in an apartment. Having done this before we are thankfully aware of some of the pitfalls and hidden costs. We also have friends living there who moved out over a year ago and know full well what is necessary. They found the rental market to be astronomically different from here. In fact to rent their 750 square foot apartment cost them $56000 HKD for the first month due to all the common fees charged by landlords and agents. They will recoup a substantial portion of that when they move, but ouch, what a welcome.
There are also the hurdles of getting some extra schooling while still working so that the government will be satisfied that we are not there to steal their jobs. I will be doing Tuesday evenings and two Saturdays a month from November until March to get my TESOL certification. On top of this education we will tackle, once again, the task of learning Mandarin Chinese and teaching our kids until we can get a tutor in the spring.
Some folks do this kind of thing naturally and may see this as a pretty easy schedule, but we are fairly laid back people so this is quite a change for us.
In my next post I will go more into what the Zheng Sheng school is about and what role we will lay there. There is also a video that I will try to embed which gives an excellent and brief account of the school in its current state. I may even get this done before the weekend....will wonders never cease?
Oh yeah there should be pictures of my trip up very soon on our Flickr site.