Overflown

The Museum of Fine Art is on the flightpath for Taipei's domestic airport, which means every couple of minutes another plane flies over. They must be rather proud of this, because in the entrance hall of the museum is an installation consisting of some very loud speakers that blare the sound of a plane flying overhead, while a shadow of a plane is projected across the ceiling. This is fun the first few times, but I imagine the museum staff could be quite aggravated.

The rest of the museum is quite peaceful; there are a lot of paintings of papaya upstairs at the moment, and when we sat in the garden in the basement we were in a space that was practically silent. After the noisy road and the virtual overflight, it was almost eerie to be sat in somewhere so quiet. So we went upstairs and looked at papaya again, then walked back to the hotel and took a taxi to the airport.

Back in Hong Kong, I was disconcerted by the traffic. It was a longer journey to get from the airport to Tin Hau this evening, than to travel from Taipei to Hong Kong. Partly that was because we were travelling in a rickety old taxi, rather than a well-maintained 747, but congestion seemed exceptionally bad in Hong Kong this evening. Perhaps it was the crowds of drunks that had been shipped in for the rugby sevens this weekend. Perhaps the streets were thronged with people excited to see us return to the country. Or perhaps it was just that it was a Friday night.

Unluckily, we'd arranged dinner this evening at a restaurant that's been closed for months. It's hard to make a reservation on rugby sevens weekend, if you are trying to secure a table within 30 minutes and drunken rugby fans have grabbed everything. Somehow we managed to catch a table at an Italian-American place at the top of a new mall in Causeway Bay, and although I ate more than my own bodyweight in pizza this evening, this was a successful night. And so to bed.