I'm seeing HK through a fog of sleep-deprived exhaustion. so forgive me for the lack of scintillating posts. as a resident rather than a tourist you tend to notice minutae instead of the impressive features of a place.

like: the way there is a United Nations of Coke in the supermarket. for a premium, you can get Japanese Coke, Korean Coke and so on. it all tastes the same - kind of like Australian Coke really.

like the bizarre swimming pool protocols. the rules are the same - stay left, swim in the correct lane for your speed etc - but in practice, everyone cruises along doing breaststroke in whatever land and whatever side of the lane they feel like. in Melbourne, I'm a slow swimmer. here, I'm Ian Thorpe. no wonder they had to give their female swimmers hormones to get them medals.

predictably, the Olympics are everywhere. with the next games after this years' in Beijing, Olympic themes are appearing on murals, in advertising and on (Chinese) Coke cans.

last night we saw Spiderman 2 across the road. we learned that you need to book early to get 2 seats together. and I learned the Cantonese symbols for "person(s)", "thank you" and "just" (as on only, merely). also that as far as English movies go, Melbourne is about ten times better than "international" HK. the only movies are big blockbusters, and even the sole arthouse shows Robert Altman - interesting, but not exactly out there. and baby sessions? nonexistent. sigh.