A Friday evening in Hong Kong.

Hong Kong feels like a safe, friendly place,one of those cities I feel instantly at home in and believe me, I'm no city lover.
 I'm sitting outside a street bar on Queen's Road East drinking a mojito (v. Hemingway!) and watching early evening Hong Kong rolling by before my eyes like waves on a tide of humanity. It's a cliché but that's what it is, a human sea.This city is vibrant and thronging.'Throngs' seems to describe perfectly the hundreds, thousands of people constantly on the move, on foot, in taxis, cars, buses and trams.
 It's early Friday evening, the end of the working week for most of Hong Kong's inhabitants and already the sub-tropical dusk is settling in. Even the ubiquitous crested bulbuls and black collared starlings have ceased their screeching and whistling and have flown off to roost in the surrounding parks and public gardens. It's not been a memorable day weather-wise.Once again, after three of four days of warm, pleasant sunshine, the anticyclonic murk has enveloped the city. Driven down from the north of China by the north-western monsoon winds it has been augmented,some say,by the industrial pollution from the factories in the southern Chinese provinces adjacent.
 The buses and the MTR (Mass Transit Railway) deposit their human cargo. Businessmen, office workers and pretty Chinese shop-girls, elegant and so delicately featured that they resemble dolls, surge towards me and onwards like an incoming tide. Individuals stop and linger for a drink, it seems like a ritual, before taking the bus or a taxi back to their homes in the outlying suburbs.They must live, I imagine, in the myriad apartment blocks and skyscrapers which line the city streets and jostle the shoreline of the harbour creating the vast canyons of concrete and steel which characterise this seething,amazing city. Hong Kong is a culture shock as well as a shock to the senses. Not in the same way as some Asian cities where there is a dramatic contrast between wealth and poverty but in that the sights and scenes are so unfamiliar.The contrast perhaps lies in the juxtaposition of the ultra-modern and the older,more traditional way of life which seems to continue to exist despite the perpetual modernisation. Also perhaps in the sense that, as Europeans, we find it difficult to understand how so many people can live in such close proximity with seemingly so little personal conflict or annoyance.Everyone seems at ease, purposeful and positive. People smile, chat and relax even if only for a short while on their way to wherever they are headed.
 In Hong Kong tables and chairs in front of street bars, street restaurants and cafeteria terraces are, I'm told, considered by law as public areas and as such anyone has the right to sit down at a table and stay for as long as they wish without obligation to buy a drink or meal. One often finds this on Sundays when the city's thousands of Philippino maids and home-helps have their day off and congregate to spend the day together. They find a place to meet which suits them, meet up and occupy it for the day.Picnics are produced and card and board games begin.
 In front of me tonight the three furthest tables are occupied by little old ladies knitting and chatting and street workers consuming plastic tubs of steaming noodles from street takeaways. A fishmonger arrives complete in white apron and white wellies.He's fresh from Wan Chai fish market where he guts and cleans the fish. It's his cigarette break and he settles in the chair next to them and lights up. Seemingly oblivious to his presence, his blood spattered apron and boots and his smoke they continue to knit and chat unperturbed.
 Wan Chai market is a wonderful place.It takes a little getting used to at first but once you're accustomed to the noise, bustle and smells it's a total sensory experience.Row after tightly packed row of stalls offer the discerning customer all manner of exotic Chinese vegetables from pak choi to water chestnuts and Chinese mushrooms.It's a living stir fry! Fruit is everywhere.Oranges,apples and pears,limes,rambutans, lichees, mangoes and the cloying, cheesy smelling durians are snapped up by the eager,choosy shoppers.
 The fish stalls exhibit fish, molluscs and crustaceans and even the sad eyed, long necked turtles, all the fruits of the New Territories fish farms and the South China Sea.The fish are so fresh that they are still alive.When she has selected her fish,the discerning housewife watches her purchase dispatched, eviscerated and filleted. A Chinese friend tells me that unless the fish is killed before her she does not consider it to be fresh.She cannot understand why some people, presumably Europeans, seem to prefer to buy fish which are already dead. Perhaps my fishmonger needs a cigarette to steady his nerves.
The side streets next to the market are thronged with shoppers and stalls.It's the eve of Chinese New Year and the stalls are decked out in red and gold talismen and trinkets promising good luck in the coming Year of the Dragon.My friend Mark, who has lived in Hong Kong for the past thirty years,tells me that the birth rate will rise dramatically this year because babies born in the Year of the Dragon will be lucky in life.
 Next a group of students (or are they young office workers?) arrives at the table next to me.They sit down and begin an animated discussion until they are finally persuaded by a pretty,overworked waitress to buy a drink. It's getting late now and slowly but steadily a few Europeans and Australians drift in for the post work 'swill'.Judging from the number of beers they consume they seem to be here for the long haul. It too seems like a Friday night ritual.
 'All human life is here', a newspaper slogan from my long gone youth comes back to me unbidden.Perhaps this is true too of this vibrant, colourful city where Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese,Philippinos, Asians of every nationality, Australians and Europeans seem to work, socialise and co-exist happily together in the post-handover Hong Kong where the patronage of the New China seems to offer relative economic and material prosperity to the majority of its citizens.

A new direction

I'm somewhere over eastern Europe,cruising in a Cathay Pacific Boeing at 31,000 feet and heading towards Prague. The cloud cover is almost total and the few breaks in it reveal that the landmass beneath us is snow covered.
 It's early January and several months since my simple life in south western France changed forever.I'm beginning a journey that will take me three months and to places as far apart as Hong Kong, the Philippines,South Wales, Paris and Andalucia.
 For now, the western edges of Europe are enjoying are enjoying mild, unseasonal weather.Claude, my neighbour in our little French village, mails me, 'C'est déja le printemps,on est content'. The skies for those who live beneath the giant plane must be constantly grey with the threat of more snow, 'encore la grisaille' as the French say when  at home the short grey winter days deprive us of  the sunshine and the incredible luminosity that normally characterises our part of the world for the major part of the year.
 The clouds below us resemble a strange land, a magical land of snow covered hills, valleys and plains which stretches away in the distance. No cloud breaks now, only that strange cloud land as we leave Prague unseen somewhere below us and head towards Warsaw.
 Steady at 31,000 feet.I wonder, do airline pilots ever get the urge to take their aircraft higher? Do they say to themselves, 'Just to see what she can do?' To climb towards the very edge of space?' It's a stupid thought. But he's just done it!Thirty four thousand feet the little screen on the back of the seat in front tells me. perhaps he's read my thoughts.Echoes of 'the Intention Experiment'?
 The whole of eastern Europe must have had a grey,snowy day. And, 'as the sun sinks slowly in the west' we head towards Minsk and then Moscow.it's -57°C outside at this height the little screen tells me and it can't be my warmer on the ground I imagine!
 I can't sleep My watch tells me it's 6 pm Paris time. I haven't reset it to Hong Kong time, an action I shall regret deeply later. We are now passing over Russia and heading towards Astrakhan, a name I dimly recollect from my childhood. My mother once owned a coat which possessed a collar of the same name and of which she was intensely proud. Funny how these little thoughts come back in moments like these.
 I stretch my legs after scrambling over the two young French lovers in the seats next to me, asleep, entwined in each other's arms since we left Paris, and make my way aft to the toilets. In the queue I meet a middle aged Frenchman, who introduces himself as Jacques, an ex-pat who lives in Cebu in the Philippines and runs an import/export business, has a Philippino wife, two young children and enjoys 'la peche sousmarine' in his spare time. He is into 'tutoying' immediately. The French do not normally lapse into using the familiar 'tu' form of address unless they know you well or are a workmate or team mate. Perhaps he recognises me as a kindred spirit or a man of the world like him and is paying me this compliment of mateiness.
Whilst we are waiting for the toilet to become available he regales me with the tale of a giant grouper he speared last year, 'un vrai gros', real beauty, a fish he had been trying to get for years he tells me without success and then apparently, one day not so long ago he finally succeeded. 'Et tu sais,' he says 'maintenant à chaque fois que j'y plonge ce poisson me manque énormément. Il était comme un ami à moi.C'est bizarre!' I enter the loo slightly puzzled.
We are now over Bukhara and heading towards places whose names seem to be from another planet, Almaty,Karagandar, and Tashkent before entering deepest Asia and the Sino-Tibetan plateau. The skies are clearing and the sun is rising. But it's only 7pm Paris time and I feel as if another day is beginning and I haven't slept a wink, something I shall regret later when we land in Hong Kong and I have another full day to get through.