Sunday is meant for a relaxing day. So, forget about the technique stuff and let me tell you a story.
The above photo was taken in a typical open wet market in Hong Kong. Usually it is a road which has been flanked and occupied by the kiosks for so long that it becomes an open market at last. The kiosks continue to expand as time wears on. Eventually, the road is reduced to the width of a single lane carriageway. As the open market is actually sitting on a traffic road, cars are allowed to drive through it. Shoppers have to shun the moving cars, retailers sometimes to relocate the goods to make way for the drivers, who must drive in a cautiously slow speed while honking all along the narrow road. This is aptly illustrated by the photo.
When I was a small boy, a friend of mine had to walk through an open market on a long ramped road to his school and back home. It was a long time ago and the environmental hygiene was not good. The road was uneven with numerous holes holding waste water to become dirty puddles. The unruly kiosks were blocking the road with shoppers and hawkers alike standing in the way. Flies were hovering in the air to look for sumptuous meals at the fishmonger’s shops and the butcheries where the dead meat was very deadly smelly.
It went without saying that walking through the open market was not a pleasant thing to do for my friend. And he had to do it twice, six days a week (school had classes for six days a week then).
So, one day, this poor schoolboy walked along the open market behind a small lorry moving forward excruciatingly slowly. There he got an epiphany, “Why don’t I take a free ride?”
From that day, he would wait for some lorry to come, go behind it and hold onto anything secured at the back of the lorry. He stepped his legs on the bumper and off he went to school and back home in the same fashion.
It is one of the fondest memory of my childhood. And it always remains me to let my own children be naughty as long as it does not hurt anyone.
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