EDITOR’S NOTE
Who knew that a five-letter word starting with “c” could cause so much fuss and controversy?
No, not “COVID”. I’m talking, of course, about “caulk”, one of the recent answers to Wordle, the daily puzzle that has taken the world by storm lately. Players weren’t happy. “What on earth is caulk?” came the outcry. “Nobody knows that word!”
I disagree. I think Jenny Selevan knows that word. After all, she has just finished renovating a junk in Hong Kong – the one on our cover! – and if there’s one thing a wooden junk needs, it’s quality caulk. Jenny and husband Marc found a flyer for the old 50-foot teak boat, and over the past 12 months they’ve transformed it from, well, junk, into a seaworthy star. Find out more from page 30.
She’s not the only one tackling a big project in tricky times. For this issue of Expat Living, we chatted with six women who are kicking amazing entrepreneurial goals across a wide range of fields (page 56). Bailey Cherry, for example, started a platform for placing second-hand books in the hands of people who can use them, rather than adding to landfill. It’s proving a huge success – and all while Bailey’s still at school.
No surprise to see this kind of enterprise from a student, though. Particularly not in HK. Some of the schools here are providing remarkable platforms for kids to maximise their energy and creativity; we profile five of them, from page 49.
Are you a Wordle family? We were – at least, for a while; it was a fun distraction for a few minutes each morning. And my daughters loved to gloat when they beat me – which they seemed to do with alarming frequency.
But then we started doing the spin-off puzzles. First, it was Dordle; then Quordle; and then we found Octordle, where you have to figure out not one word but eight!
Soon there’ll be a game where you’re just asked to list all the five-letter words you know. (There’s already a Cantonese version of Wordle, by the way – it’s called Zidou.)
It all got a bit much, so we moved on. I now encourage my girls to get a pencil and do the puzzles in the back of Expat Living instead.
They can’t beat me at those, because I write them.
Here’s to some brighter spring and summer days ahead.
A huget hanks everyone in our Readers’ who voted Awards for out who won, from page8!