HK | Postscript

Partly due to photo-rationing (I'd left my battery charger at home), there were some sights in Hong Kong I couldn't or didn't get a shot of, but I now wish I had.

• The beggars.
  - The little old woman sitting with her legs tucked under her and holding out cupped hands in the underground passage near Salisbury Road. Her hair was white, but she wasn't in rags or malnourished, and she snatched at the note I held out with stunning speed.
  - The old man in filthy rags and hat stretched out on the ground by a traffic light, seemingly asleep and unseen by the milling crowd.
  - The woman I saw at Causeway Bay the very day K had told me, defensively blithe, that many of the beggars in HK were from mainland China, sometimes missing a limb or disfigured or both, and it was up to the individual to decide if it was worth giving them money. And there she was that afternoon - missing a hand, with terrible burn scars on her face and neck.
  My closest memory to all this is of the homeless lining a piss-dank underground passage leading from Shinjuku station, and that seems cheerful by comparison.
  

• The breasts.
  A shop front and a billboard with life-size and larger breast-enhancement (?) ads flaunting bare mammaries for all to see.
  Are you sure you didn't wander into a red-light district? a friend asked when I told her.
  No - I'd seen the come-hither billboards near Temple Street and they were nothing as bald as these. And come to think of it, these ads had the plainest models - as if to say: Hey, don't get titillated - so they weren't sexy, just bizarre.

• The buildings.
  There were many, many old buildings in various states of decay or abandonment, especially in Kowloon. The shabbily dignified building with the words Siberian Fur Store (wow) running down its side, the derelict shell of some bygone nightclub with its dramatically large sign still intact - it'd really be something to capture those hulking structures in all their dilapidated glamour.

• The trendy restaurants and cafes we passed on the mid-level escalators.
  Spotted in them were:
  - A man talking enthusiastically to a woman, but they're sitting at two separate tables about a foot apart, each across a companion of the same sex, and just the corner of the man's table nearest the woman is skewed towards her, almost touching her table - hmmm... are the quartet friends or strangers? Who is friends with whom? The mind boggles.
  - A waiter hugging a bull terrier.
  

So... I'll be back.