Mart-deBlog

I finished my papers and had one open week planned before leaving, to do those last things worth redoing. Bas returned from his trip through South-East Asia and was there to check out Hong Kong. Besides the retakes, there were also room for things I still hadn't done and Tai O, a tiny fishersvillage on Lantau, was one of these new places allowed in the supposed week of nostalgia. So up we went, boat and bus to where the Hakka people of Hong Kong originate from and still refuse to leave their cool mansions on wooden stakes. Tai O had exactly that surreal streak I needed. There are villagers looking a little off when you pass by, there are orderly straight tracks but also chaotic alleys that lead along the houses above the water, houses that are sometimes made of wood and at other times completely of pale metals. We walked up this hill passed a 'no trespassing' sign. Dogs started to bark somewhere, invisible until they jumped out of the surrounding green and started their bare teethed chase. We ran. We survived and ate fish and hired a little boat to search for pink dolphins. They weren't there although we did find an amazingly red house. And Snowhite, caged. And the sun set while fisher's boats returned to their harbour and I read a Deleuze text about the lasting of the past. It was a day in my last week but also a day containing that whole week in it's surreality, a day cut from all other days in being momentary but simultaneously lost in the continuity of being away from home, a day when the world spins as fast as my head and experiences can become the over-symbolic still life of a white bird flying away.