Celestial Bodies
Saturday, May 14th, 2005When I was in highschool, the literature teacher taught us about medieval jewish poetry in Spain. One of its characteristics is that there is no wild nature there: every flower has its place, every bird is in its position. The trees are carefully cut, and the floor is orderly arranged.
Just like the park here in Kowloon.
It has several areas: an aviary (to see birds), a sweaming pool, a small chinese garden (with water pool), an ‘adventure land’ (in which children play at citadel-like building), and even a flamingo pool, which hosts a few dozens of them (only that here they stand on both legs - probably the water isn’t hot). Everything is very ordered, just as expected from a park between the towers, where land is a precious asset.
After the park I went to the space museum. There are two complexes of museums nearby: one includes the space museum, art museum, and a theater; the other includes the history museum, science museum, and a campus of HK politechnic institute, as well as a large public library.
It turned out that they had today a ’space day’ or something like this, so there was no entrance fee at the entrance to the museum, and there were many peoply there.
The museum itself has several areas, and I was most impressed by the innovative and imaginative ideas there. For example, in the children section there is a sandy soil to which the children can throw stones and watch the formation of craters; there is this huge spring that comes from the ceiling, to which a child can be connected to feel the 1/6 gravity of the moon (he can walk while connected to the spring); there’s this MASHPECH-shaped surface on which small metal balls fall in a helical orbit, to demonstrate a grativational well and planetary motion in gravitation field; and many more.
I should have guessed that the chinese names for start-groups would be much more imaginative than the greek ones (on which the west rely). Common names include dragons and ladies, snakes and other motifs from the chinese cultures. What I didn’t guess, though I should have, is that in different parts of the world (or at different times in history) stars were combined into groups in different ways - so the same star can belong to different group depending on your position in the world! Actually they showed some really nice examples: I saw at least ten names for the ‘ursa major’ (the big bear) group, including the chinese ‘beaurocrat’ (picturing this group as a stand on which the heavenly beaurocrat collects money) and ancient egypt’s ‘parade’ (they added more stars to this group, to form a celestial parade of a man, an ox, a crocodile, and some other animal I don’t remember right now). There is also a big planetarium there, and from the roof you can have a guided watch on the sun.
The museum was very nice. After finishing my visit there, I found just behind it a nice promenade, dedicated to movie stars (just like Holywood’s ’star street’). Every few steps there’s a name of a chinese film star, with his hand on concrete. The only name I recognized was Jacky Chan (I’m probably misspleing it, but I don’t remember the correct way to write it), adn it was nice just to walk there.
My noodle war continued this lunch. I could have just eaten normal food, but I’m not the man to give up so quickly! It does, though, give you this urge to destroy the old Chinese civilization. No wander china has so many enemies!
After lunch it was quite late, so I couldn’t go to the History museum as I originally planned - well, now I have a reason to return to Hong-Kong!
