Speed and Agility

The first time I ever caught a fly was in Carpenteria, California. My hometown, Thousand Oaks, California, lies halfway between downtown Los Angeles to the southeast and Santa Barbara to the slight northwest without about forty miles to each destination. Carpenteria is just a bit before Santa Barbara and sits as one of those prototypical California beach cities.

My hometown is not a beach city. It’s about seven to twelve miles inland with the closest passage to the sea in the western end of Malibu. Carpenteria, as my description would imply, sits on the coast, and with a small population and great weather, it’s one of my favorite getaway destinations (though I haven’t been there in quite awhile).

Compared to the big cities of California (I count four or five), the pace of life is quite slower—in a good way. Instead of having to fight for a parking spot (or in better-planned areas drive through seas of parking lots), it’s not difficult to find somewhere to park close to where you’re meant to be.

Even walking on the streets, the speed of ambulating that I had grown up with in my suburb was noticeably faster than in Carpenteria. Before I realized this, I would nearly run into people before learning to just slow down. Later we would find a conspicuous magazine in a convenience store on how to grow marijuana most efficiently, but that’s beyond the point and a different story entirely that did not involve any illegal activities.

Though I enjoy slowing down, because, hey, who doesn't, I can most definitely live a fast-paced life. In high school I would go off of five-and-a-half to six hours of sleep a night and frequent fifteen-hour days to get everything done that I had to do.

Hong Kong itself is known for having such a lifestyle. It’s funny though that they may be busy in work, life and what have you, they are some of the weirdest walkers. I’ve always believed there was a correlation between how busy you were at any given period of time and how fast you walk, but I’ve been finding reasons since day two to revise that theory.

First off, I’ve been stuck behind many a slow businessman (as indicated by his or her suit) and many more pairs of people who do not allot any room on either side to pass.

In general, people walk funny here. People think that I dwell on what’s not important, but in reality, I’m spiting back what everyone already knows. Back in the United States, most all crowded places I’ve been to have followed the pattern of walking on the right. It works as well for cars at it does for people to just have one side of the road or path, respectively, and stick to it. It just makes traffic flow better, and in the case of cars especially, it makes everything safer.

So of course, I followed suite. Seeing everyone walking on the right and walking past each other on the right makes you do so yourself, so I thought something similar might apply for Hong Kong. Here, traffic moves on the left as established by the British, so I thought people might walk on the left, just as common courtesy.

I know something as small as common courtesy is highly variable among regions, so when people didn’t really prefer to walk on one side or the other, at first it was irksome, but then I just learned to accept it. I now walk past everyone on the right, just like back home—and it doesn’t cause any more chaos than there already is during busy passing period at HKU or crowded tubes in the MTR.

What is irksome though, is that there seems to be missing any sort of courtesy when on narrow stairways or narrow paths in general. Back home, if you walk side-by-side with someone on a path that fits only two people abreast and someone is approaching from the other direction, you go single file so that the other person can get by without an issue.

Here though, I’ve walked down many a stairway where the people going the opposite direction do not bother to make room for you to pass by on either side, in which case, since I can’t just disappear, I just stand. I don’t know what else I could do honestly. As I found out at the beginning of high school, I’m skinnier walking straight forward than turning to the side when I have my backpack on my shoulders.

One of two things would happen. The first is that the person about to walk into me attempts to file towards the other side. The other is that this merging is only partially successful, in which case I get knocked on the shoulder for not making room that I really could not make.

Just another item in the sub-surface iceberg.

Copyright © 2009 James Philip Jee
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