Rain and Memories

At exactly 11 this morning it started raining. Real no-nonsense sub-tropical rain where the streets go from dry to awash in about half a minute, but the rain just keeps on coming down and down until buses are creating a bow wave and people seem to give up trying to keeping dry. A rainy day, so we decided to go to a museum for a bit. The Hong Kong University Museum and Art Gallery has some interesting exhibitions on at the moment so we got a number 40 up through the mid-levels to see it.

We perched on some side-facing seats near the front of the steamed up double-decker watching a new batch of people bursting gratefully through the doors at every stop: elderly old ladies shaking out floral umbrellas, groups of shrieking white-clad school girls clad in emergency plastic ponchos (with "World Cup 2006" on the back for some reason), grimacing men carrying various mysterious packages or manhandling small wheeled carts, thin and still-shy 1st year university students in glasses, pairs of brash middle-aged women in monotone polo shirts and flip-flops, busy-looking but grinning domestic helpers - the usual cross-section of Island society.

The museum is housed in a couple of inter-connecting buildings and has some nice exhibits and collections - mostly ancient Chinese earthenware, bronzes, jade, scrolls, furniture and carved screens nicely incorporated in to the walls and doorways. The main draw at the moment is a photo exhibition of Hong Kong under the Japanese occupation. There's apparently not a great deal of surviving information about that period, but the pictures they had on display were very atmospheric and all the more interesting now that we can identify some of the streets and buildings in them. The text of the introduction to the display read something like "We don't wish to stir up controversy but merely remember a significant period in our history" (my paraphrase). My thoughts indeed.