Hong Kong has more malls than it does parks [the ones with grass and trees]. It's not hard to work out where the loyalties of the Xiang Gang [literally fragrant harbour] people lie.

Festival Walk is a brief five minute walk from the university at Kowloon Tong. It features all major brands, including Camper shoes, a wonderful shoe company who sells their brand, extraordinary crafts, keep walking. Camper is Spanish for peasant. Also in Festival Walk you can find a large skating rink with little Hong Kong kids twirling better than whirling dervishes. In Hong Kong in the 32 degrees. It's impressive but also quite shameful. Anyway a friend suggested that people visit the malls because of the air conditioning and its a good way to escape the heat and humidity. But it's more than that. Visit IFC, Langham Place, and any suburb and you will find a mall. The need to be with many people, the social hunter and gatherer, even if it is for shoes that you neither need or will use every day. So next time you are in Hong Kong go to a mall and watch how many of the population spend their leisure hours.

Today I found a wonderful poem by Carol Ann Duffy, a favourite. And Jenne has gone back home so this is fitting. It's called Colours by Someone Else, 1987.

Sweetheart, this evening your smell is all around

Down by the fishing-boats, the sky trembling

above the pier. Your tears have dried on my palms.

Darling, we should never have done that.

You made me your own, painted my face

into smithereens. Who can say where my tongue

has been in your dark boudoir? Soft heelprints

on my shoulder, sound of the hummingbird breathing its last.

Also listen to Suite Bergmasque [Clair De Lune] by Claude Debussy. Such a wonderful piece. I don't know how music and poetry can move you so. But it does. Makes the hackles on your neck rise. Try explaining that English to cantonese or Mandarin speaking students.