Curiouser and curiouser
Never one to balk at the task of educating you good people on the day to day goings-on in the Special Administrative Region that is Hong Kong, here is the next installment.
Pies and I made a kind of unspoken pact some time ago that we would never venture out on a Sunday to any area of Honkers that you would call busy, i.e. places like Central, Tsim Sha Tsui, Causeway Bay, Mongkok and the like. The only exception would be if we had visitors who, having schlepped 6000 miles to see us, might want to enjoy a bit more of what HK has to offer than just sitting around watching the terrible TV. This pact had been reached after a number of stress-filled Sundays, where we had achieved little more than working up a good sweat and a decent level of annoyance due to the sheer swarms of people absolutely everywhere!
Turns out we were perhaps a mite hasty in the pact-forming, as yesterday, had we taken a trip to Central, there would we have found in progress the third annual Central Rat Race! (Oh yes, I can feel your envy from here!) You can imagine my disappointment when I discovered it wasnt actual rodents vying each other for the gold medal position - I thought maybe the Pied Piper was staging a comeback; you know, you've done Hamelin, next stop is logically Hong Kong?? No??
Still, some wee scamp obviously thought it would be jolly fun and japes to take that well-known idea of the 'rat race' being the everyday grind and rise to the top that business people go through and make it an actual physical race to raise money for charity.
So, in Central yesterday, according the free English-language newspaper The Standard there were "hundreds of participants scurrying down major thoroughfares and through prominent office buildings" in pursuit of "the big cheese." The idea being that your company enters a team, or you run as an individual, with the entry fees to participate being HK$50,000 (£4,050) and HK$1,000 (£81) respectively. You also have to run in business clothes and carry a briefcase (apparently this is "a baton to represent the importance of staying fit and healthy on their way to the top." Er, ok...)
Much as I would have probably broken the pact to watch the race if it had been 400 furry, pointy-nosed, four-legged actual rats running through the streets, you can't argue with the HK$2.38 million (nearly £200,000) raised for Mindset (a charity for mental health-related organisations and projects in HK and China).
However, I am mightily glad that at the same time they were congesting the streets, causing roadblocks and doubling the tube traffic, I was involved in a good bit of loafing, sofa-bound. Stress levels are twitching just thinking about it...
