Another Stroll about Town

The Central District can be a frustrating, enervating and daunting place to be in. If you wish your
muscles to tense up, your lips to pucker up and eye-brows to knit together, the corners of your
eyes to grow fresh folds or if you wish to push up your blood pressure, then there is no better place
to go. However when you do that, you must never complain that perhaps another world will
be lost to you. It's the world of lines and surfaces, the world of light and shadows, the world of
even.... colors. You'd  never have thought it could ever have been there.

White orchids inside the IFC shopping mall.

Pink orchids at the same place.  And a little outside...

peoples, taxis, boats, signs, trees, shrubs, roads and sea all cut up into convenient bite size
images.





Curves, ovals, rounded-off roof amidst the tiny tremors on the surface of a fountain?





There are even patches of red and oranges upon the shimmering surface of the water!

People standing waiting, sitting relaxing, coming and going down escalators
amidst smooth reflected chrome surfaces.

More people coming and going, newspaper in hand, looking around or simply sitting.

Triangles, rectangles, parallelograms, circles and simple straight lines, even trees and shrubs!




People eating. Oh yes, I need to eat too!

Before the fast food restaurant, circles of light and shade, helping not a little to break the
monotony of the otherwise dull and dark interior.

Even flowers in yellow and white! They were tightly squeezed together in their allotted spaces
beneath tiny gray squares. Perhaps, they're no worse than those who placed them there. At least
they got an occasional spray of water before they fade and their withered looks are removed
forever from passing gazes, sharing their final resting place with other trash at some dirty plastic
bins at an obscure corner of the narrow sunless lane at the side of the plush chrome and glass
structure. How they shine and brighten up the otherwise empty and impersonal hall in the
meantime before their predetermined demise, craning their necks for a bit of sun and attention!

But once I sat down, I discovered the eyes of a number of "snake ladies" staring at me.
They were firmly escounced upon the necks of a row of green "Perrier" bottles. I wonder if they
felt comfortable exposing their thighs to the marauding gazes of strange oriental men.

After lunch I strolled to my favourite haunt, the harbor front...



And found myself amongst leaves and flowers.





Some sturdy ferns.





Tree leaves, some yellowing already and others with edges all curled up. Not very auspicious.





I looked up. The sky was overcast. Will it rain? Fortunately, I found some flowers to cheer me up.

Some tiny red flowers.

Some tiny yellow flowers.

More tiny red and pink flowers.

Even chains of green beads. But it was beginning to rain.

A bright yellow flower in the tiny drizzle which had begun in the meantime.





A string of water beads gravitating to the underside of a steel bar. How long will the surface
tension keep them there? Who knows? In the meantime, leaves were falling everywhere.





A huge worm-eaten fallen leaf supported by other still vigorously growing new leaves below.
 

A fallen leaf, a number of pulpae firmly stuck to its yellow surface.

Another of its brethren but with tiny holes already eaten up by the developing larvae..

And falling flowers too.

One of its brothers and sisters, not so lucky. No bench to hold it up!

Another fellow victim from a different or the same species which fell even earlier. But all equally
casualties of the merciless march of time's one-directional arrow.




A humble and mute servant of our endless construction industry standing guard at the water front.
But building for what?

Ah, a wire-mesh fence!

And locked too! Am I locked in? Am I locked out? Does it matter?

There may be hope yet. Perhaps just a little across the other side of the Pearl River Delta. Don't
you see the golden rays of the dying sun upon the burnished sides of these carriers of the "dreams"
of a "quick kill" for millions who daily toil at our construction sites, our fast food shops, our municipal
garbage or street cleaning trucks, toilet cleaners, with black plastic gloves and their power water jets
or brooms in their hands or else slogging behind numberless sales counters for cosmetic, garment
(oh sorry, "fashion"), cameras, computers. mobile phones or other domestic electronic gadgets,
jewellery, "authentic" Chinese herbs or dried seafood or in front of computer screens behind office
desks?