Entry from February 2009

So I've been in Hong Kong now for quite a while without chronicling too much, so I figured it would be a good idea to write the gist of what happened down before I forgot. Hong Kong is quite different from India. The step from India to Europe or the US is so big that it makes Hong Kong seem like another western country but with a slight Chinese flavor.

Before coming here I was in Germany with my family after having travelled around with my mother in India. This put me in a very relaxed sort of very unoutgoing mood. I lost track of time during the Christmas celebrations and so I didn't do much thinking about the next step in my study abroad odyssey until it was upon me. That actually turned out to have a negative effect on my arrival in Hong Kong as I was mentally totally unprepared to deal with all the crazy exchange students and get on with all the meeting of people that was called for when I arrived here.

The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) is peculiar in that it has approximately 300 exchange students present every semester. Somewhere between 100 to 150 of them are Americans. CUHK seems to be divided into different groups mostly along language lines. So there are Cantonese speakers from Hong Kong, Mandarin speakers from the Mainland, and English speakers from the west. These groups seem to keep to themselves. Within the exchange students there also seem to be cliques of different languages, the one I'm more aware of is a German speaking group, but I suspect that there is a French speaking one floating around as well. I have mostly been hanging out with the people who live near me, but usually I do things with exchange students. I'm friends with one of my roomapes (I have two.) and I know his friends but we haven't done any real hanging yet.

The Chinese students behave very differently from Indian students.in that they aren't as in your face friendly. They've been described to me as shy by another exchange student, and I think that is actually a good description. Usually they won't come to you, you have to approach them, but generally after the first time of forced conversation they will recognize you and say hi. I've had a little difficulty approaching people though because all of a sudden I feel nervous about forcing them to speak English, something which was less difficult in India as everyone with even the vaguest idea of what English might be tried to approach me. The floor I live on is a typical college dorm with all of the facilities that I would expect at home. The one major difference though is that no one leaves their doors open, so it lends itself to a much more antisocial environment.

Another peculiarity is that people don't seem to know other people's friends by default. I missed my juggling clubs in India as you can't buy them in Asia so I brought them here. I was trying to teach this one guy from my hostel to juggle, and three young women who were touristing around seemed interested, so I invited them (unlike in India where everyone comes up to see what you're doing people kind of walk around and look interested but don't dare approach you). I asked them their names and then introduced myself and tried to introduce the guy I was with, but they largely ignored him, which was kind of awkward. I taught them sort of the basics of how to juggle and one of them learned surprisingly fast. The guy they ignored made very rapid progress as well. I was impressed.

Infrastructure here is amazing. The subway/metro (technically called the MTR) has trains that come by every 3 or 4 minutes, so you almost never have to wait to go anywhere. Everything here, including the MTR is clean, and there is almost no trash anywhere. This is probably because there is a 1500 Hong Kong Dollar fine (200 real dollars) for littering. Coming from India I feel like I could literally eat off the floors here. It was cool. The bathrooms here are western and cleaned very regularly, perhaps twice a day.

My dorm is on the top of this huge hill and next to it is this beautiful pool of water surrounding a Banyan tree at the edge of a cliff like incline. A banyan tree is a cool because it has roots coming off of its branches that end up going down to the ground and supporting the tree some more. The pool is very clear and the view from the pool onto the bay is stellar. At night the Banyan tree is lit but the water is not so when I approached the edge of the cliff for the first time I couldn't identify what the surface of the pool was. At first I wondered if there was no ground there, and upon closer inspection I decided it must be very polished black marble as I could see the outlines of the tiles on the bottom of the pool through the still clear water. I then proceeded to step into the pool with my sneakers on, and was standing with one foot submerged and the other partly submerged before my brain registered what I had done. Interestingly enough this other exchange student did the same thing a little bit later. I think the message behind this is that if you have trouble identifying a surface be very careful to determine what it is before doing anything with it.

I've been doing my best to learn Chinese names, but they're very difficult to remember because they use a very different set of sounds than I'm used to. Also they have an intonation that goes along with them. If you make the wrong intonation your pronunciation is not only wrong, but it's so wrong that Chinese speakers can't figure out what you're trying to say. There's a real sing song to learning the language and it's very difficult, especially because my level of confidence in my language ability affects my intonation. Almost every Chinese student knows these things and have resigned themselves to using an English name. They sometimes choose cool things like Sky or Dragon, other times they just go for English names such as William or Edwin. It kind of sucks because they often choose goofy names without realizing it. It is also not so good because they give up their real name to a certain extent. I've made an effort to learn their real names, but just sort of remembering doesn't cut it. If you want to use their real names, you need to be able to say them. It's been quite difficult, and a bit awkward as everyone introduces themselves by saying "You can call me..." and then Elvis or whatever other bizarre name they have chosen for themselves.

My one roomape, Han Qi, has been really helpful in my so far pretty clumsy attempts to learn Chinese, and I'm pretty grateful already. This one incident occurred with his friend who happened to be a bit less friendly than your average person. When I asked him what his name was he started searching for an English name to tell me, but then Han Qi jumped in and said, "You can call him Jao Yu" in the same way people introduce themselves with their English names. In general Han Qi is a pretty funny guy and I'm impressed with his ability to make jokes in English despite his occasional difficulties with the language. Most of the jokes I make come from playing with the language, so saying something funny in another language is quite difficult. Han Qi's style of humor is more conceptual and so he plays with ideas rather than technicalities in the language, so it's much more portable than your typical joke. People who have difficulty enjoying the finer things in life often say that puns are the death of wit, and I never really understood how that might be true till now.

Food here is very different from Indian Cuisine. Meat is part of everything here. "Vegetarian" dishes also occasionally have meat in them. Chinese food also includes most parts of the animal in what is eaten. Often there are bones in the food, and often what you get is an bird that has simply been hacked into bitesized chunks with a heavy butcher's knife. At one pseudo party for the opening of the hostel there was an entire (head, feet, and everything except perhaps guts) pig laid out on a table which was being chopped up for the students. Chicken feet is a common food, and I tried it but don't care for it much. At first I tried ordering things at random without knowing what they were but quite often I've ended with something that I really did not care to eat, so I usually try to get an informed opinion on what will be in my dish before I order it. The weird animal parts aside, the food is not super spicy. Often it's fairly bland unless you add some sort of sauce. Noodle dishes are common and rice with some sort of a side meat dish is also very common. Although as far as taste goes I much prefer India, I do enjoy using chopsticks a lot. It makes me eat slower because I need to figure out how to pick up this or that thing, but is generally pretty simple unless something needs to be cut.

Hong Kong is famous for being a wild and crazy place. The bars are famous and so I was expecting Lan Kwai Fong (the most famous of the bar collections) to be a sprawling district of debauchery. It happens to be about only one (smallish) block of bars and clubs. The streets bordering on this block have a couple of bars too. And after midnight (when the MTR closes) there is a huge string of taxis outside the district waiting for smashed partiers to go home. It is cool to stand in the middle of the bars and see all the lights at eye level in contrast to the dark city above that. The rest of Hong Kong seems to be quite asleep at those times, although I've only been out incredibly late in other places on weird days such as Thursdays. I suspect that the reputation of Hong Kong is based off it being relatively crazier than the surroundings, something that I have no evidence for as I have not left Hong Kong yet.

I went to the Chinese New Years parade. It was not too impressive. The streets were lined with spectators about 50 to 100 people thick. But the parade had one float every 4 or 5 minutes and the floats were generally let downs as well as the people walking and dancing instead of floats occasionally. If the parade had been denser it may have been worth it, but it was not something I'd recommend going out of your way to see. The fireworks on the other hand were good. They were all concentrated in one place and our viewing angle was not ideal, but they had a fair amount of fireworks (20 minutes worth). The one issue was that since they were all very concentrated spatially the smoke clouds grew around the fireworks so that near the end of the show we could barely see anything anymore.

Two more things caught my attention recently. I was in the city one sunday and I saw many people chilling in various bizarre places such as underpasses under roads or bridges over roads. They were sitting on carboard and were usually eating or playing cards. It was clearly a picnic but on asphalt. Probably there just isn't enough grass to go to, so people go out on nice days and chill out together on cardboard and asphalt. The other thing I thought funny was that people here don't wave like we do. Instead they open and close their hands as opposed to moving their arm.

As far as being a tourist goes, up till now I have looked at a variety of different temples and gardens here. I don't understand how the temples here work, or what people generally feel about religion. The temples are not too impressive at first glance. Generally they consist of one large room filled with incense. The main religion in Hong Kong, as in many other places, seems to be shopping. There are huge malls at every MTR stop, and many markets in the various streets. I prefer open markets to malls when I need to get something, but haggling seems to be necessary in many of them. I have developed a dislike for haggling although when I was testing the waters to see the approximate price of an object, I felt a rush of adrenhaline, so perhaps I will enjoy it here. I found a beautiful market only one stop away from my school in Tai Po District. They have lots of different foods there and all kinds of useful and cheap objects for which you can't haggle. I like the market in Tai Po because it's more of a market for real people and not as touristy as the places closer to the center of Hong Kong.

I went with some of my friends to an India restaurant after the New Year's Parade. The food was very expensive but they made an excellent Palak Aloo and Chana Masala. Their Rotis were only so-so though. The thing that was most interesting to me was the way all the Indian restaurant owners behaved as Indian tourist sharks back in India. They swarmed out around us and tried to convince me to go to their restaurant as opposed to the others. Outside the restaurant there was someone selling Burfees and Ladoos and when we gave him one of the bags he gave us a Ladoo in to throw away, in a typical Indian way he threw it onto the street in front of his shop. I was shocked that they had managed to come to this completely different world without changing their habits. I wonder how long they've been here and how long they plan on staying. I've been doing my best to adapt, but it seems that I could join the already existing group of American expatriats who live here and continue living as I've always done.