As you all know I’m currently studying at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). So I figured it might be a good idea to write a post on what university life in Hong Kong is like from the perspective of an exchange/international student. Sorry Kevin (aka Earl of Stoughtingham?), a post about food will come later!Coming here I had heard that classes here are all taught in English by professors from campuses all around the world. Lucky me!, or so I thought. As a native English speaker, I had expected an easy semester; this has absolutely NOT been the case. Courses here are taught as if everyone has a perfect handle of the English language, the readings are just as complicated, if not more complicated than the ones I have been assigned to go through at home, and assignments just pile on without warning! I did a Google search of a few of my professors and most if not all of them are Ivy League educated or the equivalent and have contributed significantly to their respective fields. Go figure… Somehow, although courses seem tougher than in Illinois, I am managing (probably because I can’t play video games here due to blocked internet ports haha)!Well, at least life apart from academics is nothing short of spectacular here. Hong Kong is geographically small, but there is no end to the exploring I can do! If I’m not in a lazy mood, it’s impossible for me to be bored here! I can just hop on a random bus and expect to discover something new and interesting. Shopping here is a million times better than Chicago, and the culture here is rich and diverse! I’ll save my raving about food for another post! I don’t care what the Hong Kong-nese say about HK lacking a unique culture apart from extreme consumer capitalism, I’ve spent the past three years of my life surrounded by corn fields and kegs and I say HK is amazing!
Moving on to hall life I guess. To my knowledge, most students in the US (at least at UIUC) move out of the dorms after their first or second year. This is not the case at HKU! There’s a sort of hall culture here and the only thing I can somewhat compare this to is the greek systems back in the US or the separate houses in the Harry Potter series haha. It’s actually a privilege to live in the halls here!
Students here have an extensive application process to enter the halls and once they enter, the hazing begins, especially for first year students. The impression I get from what I have heard and from what I have seen is that if you don’t participate in “O Camp”, which takes place during the weeks before the fall semester starts, you won’t be allowed to live in the hall the following year. Yikes! Thankfully, I’m an exchange student and I don’t speak a lick of Cantonese so I didn’t have to go through this. I’m too old to have to go through a week straight of sleeping 2 hours a night and running around all day in sweltering 45°C weather haha. That and I was able to avoid the swine flu outbreak that went around my hall!
On top of the week of mandated hall hazing, each floor in each hall has it’s own initiation process. Again, as an exchange student, there really was reason for me to participate in any of these functions. I don’t participate in most of these events, but I do try my best to get to know my floor mates.
One way to sum up hall life at HKU: Hall pride is HUGE.
Anyways, my floor held a “Wild Camp” earlier this semester, which was meant to instill floor pride and belongingness, and I decided to tag along. This was a month or so ago but better late than never, right?
Here are some pictures with captions to help give an idea as to what happened exactly. There’s already way to much text in this post for me to continue to write too much!
Chronological Pictorial of Zephyrs Wild Camp 2009!:
On the bus to Aberdeen for afternoon tea. At this point I had no idea what was in store for the day! All I knew was that I was going to be spending a day and a half with my floor mates instead of romping around Macau with essentially all of the exchange students I’ve met here at HKU. I still wasn’t sure I made the right decision. No regrets though!
Afternoon Tea! Any meal that has the word “tea” in it in Hong Kong is dim sum. Yum! Olutayo (TY) ate a chicken’s foot at my suggestion only to spit it out after I told him what it was haha. He eventually finished it after he was told that chicken’s foot is good for soccer. How gullible!
Waiting for the right buses takes forever and a day in Hong Kong; specifically any buses to Stanley! At this point my shirt is completely soaked with my own sweat because of the incredibly hot and humid weather of Hong Kong in September.
We got off the bus before Stanley at Chung Hom Kok Beach. Quite a lovely place I must say! Besides the sparse population of beach bums, we were accompanied by tons of these crabs!
The Zephyrs Floor Cheer being performed on the beach and on a floating raft. I just thought it’d make a pretty cool shot.
BBQ on the beach for dinner! Everyone was just sitting around waiting for the supplies and ingredients to arrive.
And more waiting… We probably waited almost two hours for the food to arrive!
And spent another hour trying to light the charcoal!
Skewered meat covered in honey and bbq’ed over a charcoal pit. One for all and all for one? Yeah right! We were all fighting for the fire to cook our food with haha. It ended up being a very satisfying meal, and a fun one at that!
A few of us were bored waiting for the rest of the floor mates to finish eating so we ran around the beach catching as many crabs as we could. These little buggers are freaking fast!
After dinner and a few bus stops down, near the southeast corner of Hong Kong Island, we ended up at some sort of reservoir for a floor bonding activity. This is by far one of the most amazing sights I’ve seen in my life! Sadly, I couldn’t quite get my camera to capture it as well as I’d have liked. I felt like I was in some futuristic cyberpunk movie and was half expecting someone on a high tech motorcycle to zip down that bridge!
Another shot from a different angle. Again, a failed shot!
And our end destination: Stanley Pier! After a few hours of bonding activities, games, and learning the floor cheer, we had a “beer party” on the pier. To my surprise, this was actually much more fun that I’d originally expected, and the heat and humidity was all but forgotten as I downed beer after beer haha.
Well, it was fun and games… until I found out that we’d be role playing bums and sleeping on cardboard boxes on the pier for the night! For the guys that were tired enough, sleep came easily. For me, I couldn’t get myself to fall asleep on the concrete floor!
Oh well, I got to catch the sunrise which kind of offset the waves of exhaustion coming over me! This was about half an hour before the actual sunrise, which ended up being a much more amazing sight than the actual sunrise!
This is Olutayo, he’s a British-Nigerian. And no, that’s not a traditional Nigerian garb. It’s just him being funny and wearing his shirt half way!
After two hours of running around Stanley doing some sort of scavenger hunt, we ended up catching the bus back to the hall. Everyone was knocked out and this is Yuta pretending to be asleep. Didn’t quite work out haha!
Anyway, I’m going to try to breathe life back into this blog so bear with me and I think I can promise not to have such a long gap between posts again!
Posted on 4 November 2009
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