Hello Everyone,

I hope you all had a very Merry Christmas and that the coming year is a good one for you. I will tell you about my Christmas later.

For now, I would just like to apologize for leaving this story hanging unconcluded for so long. There are so many other things I would like to share with you now, and I feel this story is one best told in person.

For example, when I somewhat reluctantly entered the taxi with my three Indian companions, I thought our destination was some large pig statue. When I was elsewhere, they had asked someone at a restaurant what one must see in Hong Kong, if you only have a few hours. They were told they must go to the pig.

This is very strange, I thought to myself. I have not heard a whole lot about Hong Kong, but you would think that if there were some really neat, famous pig that everyone must see, any number of people along the way there or people within the city would also have told me about it. They did not.

So I sat myself down in the left rear seat of the cab behind the driver wondering what this pig would look like. A monstrous statue of a human-bodied pig headed being, or just a life-size pig in bronze in some interesting garden. As my mind continued to conjure hog pictures, my body, and the car continued to clamber up pitches quite steep and switch-backed. Up and up we drove, up higher and higher above the tallest skyscrapers, until we came to...

a mall on a hill. HHmmm. This is indeed peculiar. It took me a few moments to realize that there would be no swine statue seen here in Hong Kong, for in fact, nobody had said the word "pig". The word I thought was pig had been repeated vehemently many times to the cab driver by the most senior of my three colleagues before we all entered the car.

"We want to go to the -pig-" The driver appearing to not understand became the recipient of a verbal attack of sorts; "We want to go to the -pig-. Take us to the -pig-" driver said something and the reply was, "No, -pig-, -pig,pig,pig-"

So you can understand how it had all been sorted out, and we four passengers who had upset our driver got in the cab anyway, and off we went on our excursion to view the Hong Kong ham.

Friends, some of you may have figured out, if you read the quoted material in a thickish Indian accent that what my colleague (and that evenings room-mate) had in fact been saying was "peak". "Take us to the peak."

And so we were. And at the peak there was a mall, and at that mall there was a terrace, and from that terrace it was possible to view the impossibly tall buildings and the harbor in Hong Kong, and from that vantage point it was possible to hear the steady beat of rollered suitcase over large terrace tiles dragged by Indian professor of medicine teaching in China but in Hong Kong for visa purposes as he approaches the younger American English teacher who has become at the bequest of the three others their guide.

This will be better when you can hear him say "peak"

Until then, I hope you are well, and extend the "Happy everyday" New Year's wishes of my students to you. Be Well- Tyler