Becoming a local in Hong Kong.... requires retail therapy.

How do you know you're a local in Hong Kong? Is it the day that you ride the MTR subway for 4 hours just because you got a new Nintendo DS? No, it's when you get a callous on the finger you use to push the 'close door' button on the elevator! - Michael Dorscher, Take Out Comedy Club.

Maybe it's the week you start to understand local jokes... The MTR offers wireless internet, and the lift doors never close. But the sheer number of local secrets in Hong Kong is staggering... the best dim sum, how to cross the road, the precise look to give a waiter in order to get their attention, where to find the best bargains and when, and above all, how to get by on less than HK$50 a day (£4 folks!)in a city where fast cars, beautiful people, grown-up manners and commerce, above all, rule.

So it is not surprising that today, the first day when I truly have lost that surprise that there are many more secrets to be found, that not one, but five, tourists ask me for directions and tips. Have I a callous? No. Nor a Nintendo, before you ask. Still consider myself a tourist? God yes. And what do I think now about Hong Kong, six weeks in? Same as before. This city takes your breath away. Every day. And that's not the humidity talking.

This morning, I took a little trip to Hong Kong Park - hidden by the trees amongst the vast banking towers that overlook it. The viewing tower here, built to look like a helterskelter, caught my eye on day one in HK, and my imagination. To me, it symbolised what I saw all around me, a playground for grown-ups. Fashion, fine dining, flash motors and finesse. All this, decorated with brand names, and hemmed with international reference points. A city for the world. Hong Kong Park, however, has other ideas. Here, all is peace. Underneath the tower, the locals and Gweilos (white ghosts) escape the heat in Tai Chi Court, a shady corner of quiet on a hot and humid day, some practising the art, some like us, just resting.

Two beautiful ornamental lakes sparkle with coi and terrapins, adorned with dragonflies that twinkle in the sunlight. An aviary lets you walk through the treetop canopies so close to the birds that they sing to you and you feel that you could touch them. The Imperial Pigeons swooped down overhead close enough to ruffle my hair and remind me who was in whose territory. The Bali Mynahs sang and whooped and sang, and the black-capped Lorys ate and ate, unfazed by the Gweilos walking by. Here, there is no reminder of the vast concrete and glass ornaments that decorate the sky outside. Over in the conservatory, there is no respite from the day's heat, with its plants from all over the world, like maids in waiting to the local orchids, pink and white and uprightly elegant, moving gently like a slow deep breath in the warm air.

Leaving the park, it's back into the buzz and swarm of Monday in Hong Kong. A quick $2 tram ride, sans air-con, leaves me in Central, passing the legislative council building and Louis Vuitton on the way. Here in Central, therapy is expensive, and it's all of the retail variety. I visit the Arts & Crafts centre, to look in awe at the tusk and wood carvings, paintings, precious stones, and handmade silk offerings. There's something here for everyone... if you can fit it in your suitcase! I settle on silk, and head for the door before I sell my first unborn child for an antique woodcarved brush pot. Across on Pottinger Street, I'm seduced by hand-embroidered mandarin jackets and pop in for a 'look'. Bags in hand, I head upwards (in Hong Kong, there are only two directions, and up is one of them!), and spot a Shanghaiese restaurant by the steps, staying for a bowl of fried noodles and a cold Coke to follow the hot Chinese tea brought the moment I sat.

Maybe it's the 'confident' way I shovel in the noodles with chopsticks (and you think spaghetti is an unattractive first date meal???!) but two minutes later, I'm joined by an American woman from another table hoping for directions. Feels good, till I get out on the street, and halfway home, realise that I sent her left instead of right! There's a little antiques shop that's had me drooling at every passing, and this time I go in. Why not? There's fifty percent off most things, as they're moving premises next month. Carved wooden screens, painted chests, bone mahjong sets, elegant dark wood side tables. It's too much. I shove the credit card deeper into my handbag and sing at the shop manager, I'll be back, feeling like the love-child of the Terminator, Cruella deVil and Judy Garland.

As I step onto the street, the heat hits my face and the door my ankles, and I realise this city is not about fun, it's about seduction. The mouth-watering smell of food, cold ice-clinking drinks, open spaces hand decorated with blooms and painted at odd corners in bright colours to offset the humdrum, the safely shark-netted swimming beaches, careful conservative gentle guidance, the smiling service, the affordable luxury. Only the hot humourless sun and the throbbing humidity remind you how truly densely populated is the 'Barren Rock' and how dependent on the intricate weaving not just of silks and skills, but of the millions of individual lives moving around one another, smooth and glamorous in appearance, but with endless attention to form... slow, quick, quick, the Hong Kong quickstep. Time to dance.