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When you are travelling, every day is a Sunday!!!: you are often not aware what day of the week it is. I headed across the Bay from Kowloon to Hong Kong and hopped on a double Decker bus to have a look. Right away I noticed hundreds of Pilipino women parked in every nook and cranny around the Ferry dock. I thought maybe they were queuing up to buy tickets or attend an event. As the bus pulled away, every single street and sidewalk and park and, well everywhere except on the roadway, were large groups on Pilipino women. Sitting on newspapers in big groups, sitting on tarps or blankets having huge buffets or sharing KFC or MacDonald's. I even found one big group playing Bingo with a makeshift Bingo machine set up in a corner of a parking lot. Most had ghetto blasters playing music - some large groups were dancing: Groups side by side - listening to different music and doing different types of dancing. Quite remarkable to see. The city was quiet - few businesses were open: downtown Hong Kong is a major business centre and changes on the weekends. I just couldn't take in how many Pilipino women could be in one place and it confused me. I finally figured it out - Sunday is the day off for Domestic workers and there really are that many domestic workers (nannies, housekeepers, dog walkers (huge dogs in a small space seems to be a real Chinese status symbol??) and they have no homes or spaces of their own - so on their days off - the thousands of them go to the street and meet their friends and do the things that most of us would do in our own spaces. Imagine spending your life looking after someone else's children so you can send money home to have someone else raise your own kids......happens every day in Calgary but seeing the thousands and thousands of these women really commanded a lot of reflection for me on what a weird world we have with such extremes between the really rich and the really poor. These women, who live in the some of the richest apartments in the whole world, have to spend their days off on the cold pavement, sitting on newspapers, sharing food and language from home with others who are in exactly the same lonely positions. Funny thing is they looked a lot happier than most of the rich broads lined up at the Chanel , Louis Vitton and Gucci stores. Maybe it was just the lining up that made them miserable? Hong Kong is the epitome of everything really really rich. Seven million people squished onto two small islands - 1100 square kilometers - one of the highest density places in the world.
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