I like your philosophy

I could have been normal / But why the hell would I want to be

Nemine contradictione

Your heart follows its own logic. For better or for worse, you'll be a lot happier if you don't try to confront it head-on.

Next stop is People's Square

You may interchange to Lines 1 and 2.
You may alight from both sides.
Please, get ready.
And ... SCRUM!

Here and Now

I'll never go home. Who told you I wasn't at home?

"How could we explain it?"

Somehow the topic of June 4th came up during lunchtime. It was a sad reminder that the wound continues to fester, unheeded and unattended.

Andante spianato

I am a still pond. No matter how many ripples the passing winds and flotsam leave on my surface, nothing, nothing, will ever perturb the serenity of my depths.

A Moment in Time

Keeping with the spirit of traveling in a rush, after Hong Kong I went to 武汉 to see the cherry blossoms.
They were still in bloom, and quite beautiful.

I realise, though, that catching a single glimpse shouldn't really count as 赏花. Rather, to really 赏花 would entail having seen the buds start to appear, and then bloom, and the blossoms finally wither and fall. Not just a single glimpse of the flowers frozen at a single point in time. Especially with cherry blossoms, which are supposed to be symbolic of transience ...

But I couldn't stay so long, even though I had awesome company. Mostly because I had to get back to skiving around at the school work.

Noblesse Oblige

Aristocracy is a state of mind. Despite your (not very) valiant attempts, Mr. and Ms. Lee, you're not quite there yet.

Bleeding Heart

Why is that a derogatory term? How could any informed person with a conscience not have a bleeding heart in the essentially cruel, unfair world we live in?

Whooosh

So I'm a speed junkie. Oh well, aren't we all.

Malthus would laugh at China

Hong Kong was extraordinarily dense. The tall apartment buildings invariably hugged close to one another, and to the mountains on one side and the sea on the other. That was as much a function of the geography, which limited the proportion of the land which could be built on, as of high population density.
Perhaps that also helps to explain why the city didn't really feel very crowded, especially compared to Shanghai or Guangzhou. There weren't crushing crowds on the streets or on the metro or on the busses; the train stations and bus stops weren't overflowing with human traffic; the restaurants and shops weren't being overwhelmed by hordes of customers.

Because it was so much less crowded, everything felt in control and nice, instead of being messy, chaotic and harried as mainland China tends to be. Even though a lot of the infrastructure and systems were actually pretty similar in design in both places. The bus terminals for instance. They're essentially the same design, but the ones in Shanghai always seem to on the brink of chaotic breakdown thanks to the crowds of commuters, whereas the ones in Hong Kong are paragons of neat order.

Moral of the story: overpopulation makes everything hellishly harder. Cue Malthus.