Andre

What a great sight: 9am on a Wednesday in the heart of Causeway Bay and it's virtually empty. Usually at this time it would be the morning rush hour making it impossible to even stand at the place I took this picture but thanks to Tropical Storm Kammuri which by now has turned into a typoon signalled at number 8 on the local scale, most people stay at home as everything but emergency services, limited public transportation and some die-hard private shops remain open. If the signal stays up until past noon, the rest of the day will be off as well.

I had a chance opportunity to watch the latest Batman movie The Dark Knight in a Philippines shopping mall theatre. Happy about this and excited to see what everyone's talking about, the afternoon turned into a nightmare to the point of ruining the movie experience. I shall never set foot into a local cinema again, given I was assured there's nothing unusual about all that I experienced.

In short, throughout the movie I had to endure:

• Most of the audience were children aged anywhere from 5-10, having a blast like it would be their own McDonald's birthday party (forget about any movie rating whatsoever);
• People chatting like at a bar on a weekend evening;
• People coming and going like in a train station;
• Mobile phone lights like in a disco (surprisingly no ringtones though);
• The couple next to me was exclusively playing for the first 2/3 of the movie with their mobile phone and then left, not looking once at the big screen;
• People standing up for no reason;
• It was a lot colder than even the freezing Hong Kong theatres with occasional wind blows matching a typhoon.

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Hong Kong's relation with grass could be summed up in the widely used line "Off the grass!" despite having a lot of nature - obviously the problem is that people prefer to stay within the city and thus don't see the nature, even less so actually touch it. So what's wrong with the picture below?

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I did it! I finally, totally unplanned and by pure luck, was the first one in the waiting line at a local HSBC branch.

Not just any branch but one in Causeway Bay where usually the crowd spills back to the road to withdraw cash. It's not really a branch designed for counter services but nevertheless they do have some tables set up for personal paperwork.

A week after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, more news articles and discussions are focusing on why so many buildings - in particular the over 9000 destroyed schools - collapsed.

The answer to that question is very simple and has nothing to do with prejudgement: absolutely no construction quality.

That was my very first thought when I heard about the quake (I didn't feel it myself in Hong Kong though many others did). Sadly but true, Mainland China is well-known for saving wherever it can even if enough money is available, and most of the times the savings go into some local officials' and constructors' pockets.

How would you interpret the following sentence?
"All 61 schools funded by Hong Kong charity group Sowers Action were still standing after the quake and no casualties were reported at them - including 7 near the epicentre in Wenchuan County."

You would probably come to the same conclusion as I did. As the group's chief executive Johnny Leung Kin-wah points it out: mainland authorities were particularly concerned about the quality of projects involving foreign capital.

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