Week 3, settling down real nice

This week lessons and studying is starting to become a routine, I've now had tutorials in all of my courses which has given me the chance to talk a bit more with my classmates and I've made some really good friends, mainly with the people I do group assignments with as they're the ones I've spoken to most.

I'm still a bit surprised over how much people talk to each other during lessons and how reluctant they are to answer questions and so on. Makes it hard for me to get to know them as I kind of have to sit in the front to be able to hear the teacher at all, and in most classes the rest of them sits further back..

For food I do a complete combo, sometimes I cook in the pantry here on my floor, sometimes I eat in the canteen or buy something from 7Eleven and sometimes we go out for dinner. Eating out here is  common so prices are very low. But that's only really for local places, if you want "western" food it can cost a bit more. So it's handy to have a local friend coming with you as you might otherwise have to skip a restaurant because you need a menu with either English or with pictures :P 

Tuesday evening the hostel association, or something along those lines, arranged an event on the 7th floor which is a common floor for everyone if I haven't mentioned it before. Laundry room, computer room, common room, another pantry that seems to be locked most of the time, a cafe (which opens at like 22 in the evening. That's not the time I want to go and buy stuff with sugar in it... And it closes at 1 I think, a perfectly normal time..). The 7th floor is also the only floor where boys and girls (I would say men and women but I find it so weird, the idea to control how men and women are allowed to spend their time) from the various floors (girls-only and boys-only) can meet. And after 22 there's no visitors allowed at all from outside the hostel. So the event was "100 tricks to make hostel living easier", not quite 100 tricks but still good fun, everything from how to peel a potato without a peeler, how to erase bad smell from shoes and so on. Good fun, people are just so insanely happy and friendly here.

Hall C! 

Friday is my day off so I have a nice and long weekend every week! This Friday I met up with two of my classmates to start working on a presentation. And after that was my hall's annual dinner on the main plaza here on campus. We were, as always, far too early. Even though we were 5 minutes late. And the event itself was a bit tiring, at least to me. Plastic stools to sit on does not help my back and then like 2 hours of speeches in Cantonese is just not my idea of Friday fun. But the atmosphere was great, some tables had agreed on a dress code before hand so there were some tables with everyone dressed in pjs and some tables with kind of traditional looking outfits. The food was a hotpot, basically every type of meat and seafood imaginable simmering away in a big pot. Really not to my taste. I don't do well with the meat having so much bones and stuff. Some performances and so on and then bed time!

Main Plaza

Hot Pot

Mix of outfits

We decided to dress in red which is the hostel's colour. Here with some of the floor tutors/international tutors, who arranged the dinner.

Saturday was a very busy day! Irene and Theresa, the girls I studied with on Friday, took me on a tour around Hong Kong pretty much! We saw two temples, Sik Sik Yuen Wong Tai Sin Temple and the temple of Ten Thousand Buddhas. 

Sik Sik Yuen Wong Tai Sin

I'm born in the year of the Horse.
So here's me and the horse

Altar for the incense sticks.
Also common to place fruit or other
foods there, as a gift for the gods.

Theresa, me and Irene

 In the first one we lit incense sticks and prayed at three different altars and we also did a thing with bamboo sticks, some sort of fortune telling thing. I got a very good stick the man told me, but then again he would say that I guess, seeing as how I payed him.. 

Bamboo sticks

My stick that I got after shaking the
"cup" with all of them

Shake n pray

Step after step after step.
With Buddhas in every single
way there is to pose.

Needed a rest

    In the second one we walked up an endless amount of steps, flanked by Buddhas, up to a temple with, I guess, ten thousand small Buddhas in the walls.

Some pics from outside the temple

Monkeys! They were all around us, as were some dogs. Theresa and Irene were terrified, I was taking pictures.

After the temples we went for dim sum, very tasty. 

We also walked around 2 or 3 massive shopping 
centers and some markets, the Ladies Market and another one nearby. 

Best name ever

After that we went to Tsim Sha Tsui to look at the light show after which we took the ferry across to Central and walked around, eventually taking a tram ride and then heading home. So we covered Sha Tin, Mong Kok, Tsim Sha Tsui and central and spent around 14 hours walking or standing. So tired but so happy!

 After that much walking I felt that maybe Sunday should be spent walking... So me, Sim and Adrien went on a hike in Clearwater Bay. So beautiful but so exhausting. Those two guys are in slightly (!) better shape than me so they were pretty much running up and down all of the awkward stone steps. And I was trying to keep up but also take the time to get some pics and enjoy the view. Stopped by a supermarket on the way home and after a quick shower we gathered at Sim's for dinner. Sooo tasty.

Up and down I don't know how many hills

A man and his toy

Impressive golf course

Another temple!

Fishing village

Awkward steps

Sim

Week 2

I'm not getting into the week-issue again. Instead, moving on. Lessons this week, I take 4 courses and one workshop. The 4 courses consists of one lecture/week and then some of them has a tutorial every week and some every other week. Tutorials are similar to seminars back home. Less talk from the teacher and more discussion between students... Or at least that's the general idea.

I finally got over my cold and spent a lot of the week just getting used to things. I have noticed that I shift from being rather grateful that me and Jenny are happy staying home in the evenings - nice to study, watch something on the laptop and just relax to feeling a bit stressed over the fact that I am in Hong Kong and it's so cool that I ought to be out there every evening. But then I settle down and accept that I'm not 18 anymore, I enjoy some peace and quiet now... This week brought some rain followed by our room going bloody freezing. It was honestly warmer outside. AC standing on indoors makes the whole school cold, in some classrooms I almost want a jacket. In our room we were shivering through the nights for quite a while.

I did leave campus a couple of times during the week, I went to Tai Po (nearby market-town or whatever one might call it..) and walked around getting lost in the shopping malls for a while. Also went out in Lan Kwai Fong again, on Ladies Night (Thursday night) meaning free drinks, with some locals and some Taiwanese girls. Turned out that the free drnks were horribly yucky. Like really cheap vodka and pineapple juice. So I had a few sips. And spent the rest of the evening feeling really old and boring. We did go to a more quiet and calm place where the cheap vodka was mixed with cranberry, great improvement. Still, went home early.

Wednesday me and Jenny went with one of her classmates, Yinyin, around in Tai Po, to the railroad museum and a Taoist temple. We also had lunch and just walked around in shops etc.

                                                                        Vegetarian restaurant!

 Railroadmuseum

Temple. Did not take pictures inside but it was really nice! Rather small, kind of local temple. Just inside the doors there's another set of doors or at least a door opening - for the gods. So for humans there's side doors. It feels fairly hard to get a good understanding for religion here, I've tried talking it over with a few friends and a few monks (? I guess) in the temples, but a combo of language barriers and just difficulties in explaining something that's so "everyday" here and so very strange to me in a good way makes it hard. But interesting!

 Some fun fruits - giant versions of lemons and limes. Said to be more like grape. Haven't tried yet.





                    And tiny bananas! :D


Friday we went around in Sha Tin, went back to IKEA to exchange the pot we bought (didn't work on the insanely annoying induction stove thing...) and had a nice walk around.






Walk along the water





Fantastic trees







It'll be the sheep's year soon.





And somehow people walk around in jackets. Whilst I'm in a short summer dress wondering how I can be so warm..






During the weekend me and Jenny took a walk down around a bay ending up in a fishing village, really fascinating. One of many times when I've felt that pictures won't reflect what I see. From there we went hiking up a "mountain" which turned out to be not a nature reservation area as I thought, but a giant cemetery. Wherever a nice view was to be found there were lots of.. well, graves feels like the wrong word. But like little places where families clearly go to remember their dead. I would normally find it odd to take pictures of it but to be honest - we started taking pictures before we even understood what it was. So yeah.

 Many boats seemed to be sinking. Saw a whole fleet of them under the surface



                  Our big fella, great      landmark as he can be seen     from just about everywhere                             around here.

For dinner we went to Hard Rock Café, fantastic to eat just some "normal" food for us. And Sunday was spent cleaning, doing laundry and so on. Home-stuff.