leaving on a jet plane, a jumbo

I was in the airport at hong kong, one of the few places I know which allows you free wifi/ improves the shining hour anyway. Surrounded by semi comatose australians who are worried about their money having disappeared in the financial crash there this morning, said they might as well turn round and go home/ they have already had a 12 hour journey, of course.

Well it's been a funny solitary week, so I have been walking through Hk as a silent observer. I don't think I like some aspects of it. the Royal College of Art graduate girls were telling me about the lovely bird market today, but their pictures showed a half dozen little birds hopping around (well, they were still pix actually) in a little wicker cages, and some much bigger ones in cages which looked a bit too small to me. They also showed great nets full of crickets which people were buying, persumably to feed to the birds, all writhing about in their chains. not very sentient perhaps but it looks a bit cruel to me, and one of them described a shopkeeper tearing the legs off one, and she laughed about the way the body was still moving about, saying it was very traditional and obviously had been going on for a thousand years. very likely.
I also didn't like the live chicken stuff: before they are taken out to be displayed to the customer, they are cooped up in tiny containers.
In Kowloon yesterday two little Yorkies were trotting along with an old man, each one with a little waxy bag in its mouth with a red sort of torch light winking away in it. every one smiled as he went by. when i came back, the dogs were performing on the pavement to his command, picking up the bags, begging, and leaning their heads together standing on their hind legs, still with the torch bags i their mouths. I thought they cringed every time he came near them to tell them the next trick, they looked a bit uncomfortable, and that was just how I felt. probaby a soft southerner, or northerner in their terms. I can't get past that really, But our ancestors just a few generations ago probably did the same sort of unsentimental things, I am sure, the chickens in Dieppe market a years ago did not look any more happy.
Anyway, the lights and the skyscrapers, a monument to capitalism, stand alongside some very slummy high rises, right alongside, flanked and pushed by massive mirrored gigantic glass towers either side, like the illustration for some strange morality tale. especially with the neon tickertape news flashing along the,  officials loathsome. if they don't want to answer you. they look straight through you as though you don't exist. On the other hand different official tourist contacts are like Disney charactersm  with bright eyes and have a nice days. Most ordinary people I found very courteous and friendly.
I also didn't like the look of the arrogantly arranged owners of the still extant street names everywhere. I was looking through a book at the old colonial types, the namesakes of Nathan street, the Lockharts, the Jaffes, the Hennessys and Johnstons, posing langorously in the Royal this and that club, playing cricket on the green, driving their racing cars and Rolls Royce in the 1930s, taking cent re stage in all the pictures.
The announcements in English are perfectly enunciated, must have recorded some RP survivors, and good for that, sandwiched betweeen Cantonese and Mandarin, which I think I can now distinguish. I know not to call Hong kong China. the doorman thought I said another name, almost the same as Hong Kong, in central China, and said you don't want to go to China, do you? but yes, I think I would like to.It is as foreign as France was when I first went there a hundred years ago,and very exciting.

will put my anti stroke socks on now.