All the Kitties in my Building Love Sunar

Soon, I will be moving from a this fifteen-story tower of cats I live in, to a jungle island crawling with dogs.

In this building, Star Mansions on Mody Road, just behind Chungking Mansions and across the street from Fat Angelo's, there are three door men: a Chinese guy who alternates the day shift with a Pakistani guy, and Sunar. Sunar, he's Nepalese and every day, he takes the 12 hour night shift from 7PM to 7AM. I think he has asthma or something because he's always wheezing, but despite that he has a wonderful voice that sounds a little like Kermit the Frog. He's also the care-taker of the stray cats that live in Star Mansions.

There are easily over fifty cats Sunar has adopted, even he doesn't know how many, I've asked. There are all kinds of different cats, long hair, short hair, big ones, little ones. If the cats are like all the other people who live in this building, then I imagine they are either Bengali or Pakistani cats, or maybe Nepalese like Sunar. They live in the stairwells and basement, mainly, which are unfortunately very poorly ventilated areas. The stairwells smell of cat puke and cat poo, and cat pee, and sometimes the stench can make you dizzy while you're climbing the stairs. On the landing on the very, very bottom floor, where they keep all cleaning supplies and stuff, there is a home-made kitty litter bin the size of a playground sandbox, and kitty-cat jungle gym sort of thing made out of boxes, broken furniture and string (a small example in photo on left). There are little boxes of food out all over the place, too. So it's a big tall tower filled with cats, and all the stuff they cough up or shit out.

I don't particularly like cats, but that's not at all why I want to move. I kind of feel embarrassed that I don't like cats--the other day I was talking to a friend who was saying how he wishes he would go out to eat more because he's always cooking at home, and then asked me if I go out a lot. I do go out to eat for every meal, actually, except for one time when I ate a can of tuna. My friend looked really surprised and asked me why on earth I did that. "I think it has something to do with the fact that I don't have a kitchen..." and I heard myself saying that, and I got really depressed.

Also the back windows of Chungking Mansions are about twenty feet from my window, at most. I do technically live alone, but all the Ghanans in Block B from the 8th floor and up are basically my roommates. At the beginning I was very careful to keep the curtains drawn, but after a few weeks I thought I'd figured out that the window etiquette around here was that partial nudity was ok sometimes, because oftentimes I'd see naked butts, and topless women bathing babies through my window.
So I started leaving the curtains open to get some natural light in the apartment, and sometimes if the window's open, and the curtains are open just a crack to let light in I hear whistling and stuff.
Then came the fateful day I realized I really just had to move. I was walking out of my apartment on my way to work, and one of the Pakistani guys standing next to a van full of illegal cell phones or something sort of mutters under his breath, "O, she is the naked," as I walk by. It's time to move when your life sounds like a plot from Seinfeld.

Hong Kong's suburbs are all on outlying islands. Some of them don't allow cars or tall buildings, and you have to get to them by ferry. My friend is playing Captain Hook in the Asia production of Peter Pan the Musical, and needs to go to Kuala Lumpur with the show for a month, and I will be moving to his place and taking care of his dog. This is funny because Scott lives in a village on the island called Pak Kok, which used to be a pirate hideout, and also because he has been playing this role for so long, that he's grown out his hair long, dyed it black, and grown fairly unforgivably hideous facial hair. He looks like Captain Hook all the time, unfortunately. Which just goes to show that you should never judge a book by its cover, because it may just be playing a really awkward role in a musical.