About Me

Whitefella Australian learning how to be gwai lo (鬼佬) in Hong Kong

Saturday, January 28, 2012

The concrete jungle...

Though I love Hong Kong, living where we do in Tsim Sha Tsui you can feel very distant from any idea of 'nature'. Not only is most of the land that constitutes TST artificial, reclaimed from the harbour over time, but all that is on top of it is a triumph of the built environment, with the smallest buildings being about ten stories high.
There's a lot of convenience to all this, with shops and cinemas and restaurants all within spitting distance (as they so charmingly say in Australia). The downside is that sometimes the most natural thing I am in contact with is my houseplants, which have been bred, crossbred, grown by a nursery, and then bought deep in the urban jungle, in Fa Yuen St (花園街).
So it was an unexpected pleasure to have an incursion from 'the wild' (as Bob Graham might call it!). As I was typing away, working on my thesis, I realised there was a large, rather dignified beetle, on my water bottle. I don't really know what it is, though a quick websearch suggests it may be from the Pentatomidae family. I'd be happy to be enlightened about this... Now if I were back in Australia I'd just put any bugs I found back in the garden (with the exception of mosquitos, for whom this is a mandatory, though conscious-stricken, death penalty), but what to do in my eight floor apartment? I didn't know what the bug ate, but I was fairly sure it's diet couldn't be easily sourced in our small apartment. Eventually I realised that if it got up here, it must be fairly competent about getting around, so I gently put it on the ledge outside my window (ahh, the wonders of terminal velocity - no fear of heights for bugs), and got back to my work, reassured that the message from the wild had been heard...

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