August 2006
(22nd August 2006)
The train was the T812 Through Train from Kowloon to Guangzhou. Or from The Airlock, as Hong Kong is known, to China proper. The train was clean and was empty and only half an hour late. The train attendants – stewardesses? – wore bright blue suits and white gloves and, when the train had started, frilly white aprons. They came through offering newspapers, then unidentified ...
→ Pre-love
(19th August 2006)
I am better, I think. Enough, anyway, to swim in the pools and rediscover the underwater muzak. And to wonder the following:
1. why do women start sunbathing at 7.30 in the morning?
2. why - and how - do women put on their make-up on public transport?
A trip to the Peak yesterday. The Peak Tram is pulled up a very steep hillside by a very thick ...
(17th August 2006)
I think now is when I stop raving about Chinese food, because yesterday's bowel affliction has become nausea, body-bending stomach pains and a general feeling of faintness, weakness and pathetic-ness. I once got giardia in India, and I would rather never have it again, so the services of the hotel doctor were called upon to determine whether intestine-stripping antibiotics would be required. He arrived less ...
(17th August 2006)
Shanghai, Shanghai. City on the sea, in Mandarin. Except it's not. It's on the Huangpu River, which is joined by the Suzhou Creek, and - twenty miles downstream - by the Yangtze. I hadn't wanted to come to Shanghai, or at least hadn't any great desire to do so. That was very wrong. Shanghai is wonderful. It has air you can breathe. The sun is ...