City LIfe

Being here for two weeks, I have fallen into something of a routine. Living inconveniently far from campus, I find myself taking public transportation to school frequently. The buses that run by my hall are so-called minibuses (小巴) that seat sixteen, standing prohibited.

These first few weeks of class, there have been large crowds of students trying to get to campus, crowding the bus stop whenever I want to catch a bus. Besides the raw numbers trying to get on these minibuses, there seems to be no respect for who got there first, so everyone sort of piles onto the bus as the bus driver indicated how many more seats remain.

It costs either HK$4.50 of $5 to get to main campus, so since paying this twice a day adds up, the university has a shuttle service. But with a bizarre schedule and few shuttles, this resource seems more of a formality than an actual service.

Because of this, I’ve found myself taking cabs to school more often than not. At about HK$21, if you get a group of four or five together and split it, it’s roughly the same price with faster service.

If I have time, I grab a bite on campus if I didn’t already at Bay View Restaurant, a very average canteen located beneath my hall. Frequently I find coffee because my hallmates do not allow me to get to sleep as early as I would like.

Going to class, I sit more frequently towards the front of the lecture hall here than at home because the locals don’t stop chatting with each other while the professor tries to talk. (We’re still in the middle of the add/drop period, when students are choosing classes, so once this is over, not only will there be less students in attendance, but also many students simply do not show up to lecture.)

For lunch I got to one of the four eateries on campus. My favorite, the one in Swire Hall above the Global Lounge is packed. Here, instead of having tables for two and four, the tables here seat eight to twelve, which means that whereas at home you usually didn’t sit down at a table already taken, you have to here if you hope to sit.

And a note on morality and ethics, I was telling a hallmate once at a crazy McDonalds that send the fastest eater to find a table and reserve it, allow the rest of us to order, then once we get our food, allow the last person to get their food. If you don’t do that, it’s hard to get a table. My hallmate said that that wasn’t fair for some reason that I don’t remember, since it didn’t seem logical to me, but I told him that that’s what they do.

At the canteen above Swire Hall, students seemed to come in big groups. They’d claim a table with one person and all their bags and backpacks, then proceed to order. So when I picked up my food, I walked around for ten minutes trying to find seats that didn’t have bags on them. Of those, half of those were reserved (as I was told off in Cantonese).

After my classes are over, me and some of my friends (also exchange students) do something locally. There’s actually a nice mall nearby named Westwood, where we go frequently. It has a few nice restaurants, a poor selection of retail stores (but that’s not why we go there) and a Wellcome store (yes, with two Ls), which I wish the locals had told me about.

Two weeks ago, I arrived in Hong Kong without blankets of a pillow. The lack of a blanket I could deal with, as it was filthy hot and humid well into the night. The day after next, I asked a local student where I could buy a pillow. He sent me to Causeway Bay, which happens to be halfway across the island, to IKEA.

Knowing IKEA back home as a large home store, I set out, without a map or any idea where in Causeway Bay I was going. The minibus dropped us off and I wandered around for a while. After asking a few people where IKEA was and getting piecemeal answers, I decided to just go to a bedding store I saw along the bus ride. I paid HK$174 for that pillow, thinking that’s like less than $25 USD. Unfortunately for me, at the Wellcome at Westwood, a short five-minute bus ride away, they were selling nice pillows for HK$30. Oh well! It’s too late now.

As there is an undoubtable and irresolvable delay in what currently happens and what I write about in posts, I’ll say that I type this right now as I wait for a University of California Education Abroad Program “How to get approval for classes back home” seminar to start.

Also, I haven’t written about it yet, but I’ve done quite a bit of local sightseeing over the past few weeks. Just this weekend I went on two tours advertised by the school giving a good overview of the area.

Posts to come!