My first month commuting, in Hong Kong, I just rode the subway and walked. Simple.

But that was when I was staying a few steps or a few blocks from the MTR/metro/subway.

Now that I am in Mid-Levels … getting to the office in North Point is a longer and trickier proposition. Because getting to the subway is a trickier proposition. It’s a long walk either way you do it, descending 300-plus steps to the Sheung Wan station, taking the metro, going to work … or taking the crawling escalators up from Central, on the way back. And, really, either way, you’re going to be sweaty (if not soaked) by the time you get where you’re going. It’s a sweaty town.

I could cab it, sit inside an air-conditioned car, but 60 HK dollars (the fare from Mid-Levels to North Point) seems lavish when a subway ride is 5.40.

Thus, I considered my alternatives.

And now I am at, yes, the mini bus.

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I’ve been in a lot of high-rise buildings, here in Hong Kong. Twenty, at the least. Thirty, more likely.

And I have yet to see a floor numbered 4. Or, for that matter, a floor numbered 14, 24 or 34. Not a single floor with the number four attached to it.

This, apparently, is because the Chinese believe “four”  is a profoundly unlucky number.

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This will haunt me for a while. But it’s not about me.

It’s about the pathetic people I have seen the last week or two.

Last night, in particular.

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I started this about a week ago, talking about/thinking about a couple of kids I knew from Redlands, during my time at the San Bernardino Sun …

Landon Donovan and Ronnie Fouch.

The item got so lengthy, though, that I stopped — after musing about Fouch — and promised to come back for Landon.

So, here we are.

Landon seems to be having issues of his own, even after what seemed to be his best season as a professional. He scored a career-best 20 goals, leading Major League Soccer. A great season even by the standards of a guy who is, without question, the greatest American-born soccer player.

Let’s start with the recent Landon news.

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I feel badly for all of you.

Outsiders talk about earthquakes and ask people in Southern California how they can live with the threat … and someday (tomorrow? next year? 50 years from now?), when that 8-point-something quake pops on the San Andreas Fault, it will, in fact, be a disaster of biblical proportions.

But for now, the biggest threat, the most overriding year-after-year concern in greater Los Angeles is wildfires.

By all accounts, this season’s fires, running riot right now, are wreaking destruction as significant as any in my lifetime.

An earthquake comes, it shakes for 10 seconds, and it’s over, for better or worse.

Wildfires fill much of the urban mass of a five-county area with a lingering, gnawing dread.

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We live in a weird world, kids. And, I suppose, this tame blog is part of it. All blogs are. Random stuff, almost impossible to verify, that should be taken with a boulder of salt whenever “real issues” are being preached.

A few lives ago, when I was still sports editor of the San Bernardino Sun, I hired a desk guy from the Victorville Daily Press. His name was Bill Wolfrum. He had issues. I knew some of them at the time and chose to ignore them because we were deep into the “we no longer are paying real money to our employees” phase of The Sun’s decline, and my pool of candidates was severely limited and, hey, the man actually had put out some newspaper sections on deadline.

He didn’t have a car and he got to work, from Victorville, by riding the Greyhound, and he called in sick a lot and was as undependable as anyone I ever employed. Just lots of warning signs I didn’t notice because I’m naive and perhaps maybe because I didn’t want to.

And then, one day when I was out of the office, co-workers found him in the newsroom library, passed out drunk. And that was the end of his Sun career. (He apparently gave up booze soon after and, if that is the case, kudos to him.)

I was thinking of making him the subject of one of my Seasons in The Sun posts but, yes, I know my momentum in that series has evaporated, since I crossed the ocean.

Anyway, Seasons or not, this can’t wait. Check out this just-plain-strange New York Times story if you like. And read to the bottom (or skip to it), and there you will find William K. Wolfrum, as he is known in the blogosphere. (He was “Bill” in San Bernardino.)

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This is my first fall away from professional sports journalism since 1975. And even in 1975, I was covering sports at Long Beach State.

That is, I was doing sports for 33 consecutive fall seasons.

And the really weird thing is … I don’t much miss it.

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Anyone who travels knows that dealing with money in another country is a tricky business.

Trying to figure out what is a good price and what is bad, by U.S. standards, doing conversion rates in your head. That’s challenge enough.

Then there’s the physical reality of someone else’s money. Size, shape, weight … dealing with the heft and feel. Picking out 70 cents in coins in less than five minutes.

Hong Kong and its currency is a challenge on both levels. For Americans, anyway.

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I had the day off, so we had to do somebloodything other than sit in the apartment and watch last year’s American TV on cable.

So, we went for a walk down Caine Street, to the end, where it runs into the Hong Kong Botanical and Zoological Gardens. And we looked around there a bit, and saw most of the lemurs and some of the monkeys and birds. The park/zoo/garden is built into the hill eventually crowned by Victoria Peak, so it’s a bit of an uphill sort of thing, as so many walks are here. But we got to see the avian crowd and exotic flora, and a statue of George VI (Elizabeth II’s father, yes?) and the lemurs fighting noisily, so it wasn’t a useful effort. And we saw the first functioning fountain we have encountered on the island, and that counts for something. Quite nice. I think we have a picture of it somewhere (click the link).

It was dusk, and we decided to indulge in the semi-official Central/Mid-Levels expat “social” thing … which is to find one of the dozens of bars along the “travelator” (more on that in a moment) and absorb a lot of alcohol and nibble on some indifferent food and watch the world go by. Or much of HK Island, anyway.

Can’t say we were disappointed.

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Leaving the Mid-Levels neighborhood of Hong Kong is easy. It’s basically a controlled fall.

To get to the nearest MTR (subway) station from the apartment we’re now staying at, I was given one bit of direction: Just keep going downhill.

So, down I go. And down and down. Literally one step at a time, because the hill is so steep and the housing so dense, that it has practically zero up-down streets. Just winding-up-the-side streets. The fastest way down is the steps, running down narrow corridors between buildings. A school on the right, a food stall on the left …

So, being a borderline obsessive-compulsive … I decided to count the number of steps I took down. And down and down.

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