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Published: September 4th 2009
Discovery Bay
Perfect white sands, until you walk into the sea.....The euphoric honeymoon period where it felt like one massive holiday is beginning to die down and it’s becoming a case of settling into university life at CityU and making HK feel more like home.
I’ll move chronologically and go back to last week’s holiday feeling first though and bring up our trip to Discovery Bay, on Lantau Island, last Sunday. Where I live is a fairly quiet and not so busy area. Areas in Kowloon such as Mong Kok and Tsim Sha Tsui are absolutely manic exactly in the way you expect an over populated Asian city to be. Hong Kong Island is smooth, smart and seriously impressive. The truth is you feel like you’re in Hong Kong at all these places, where as once you’ve taken the 20 minutes ferry ride to Discovery Bay you feel more like you’re in the Riviera. You’re met by a European style town square area with a wealth of bars and restaurants overlooking the beach and the natural greenery of Hong Kong. The beach itself is a massive fake. All the sand has clearly been imported or something because it appears to be perfect to sunbathe or play sport on. (Had my
Mong Kong
Most populated region in Hong Kong, if not Asia. first ever match of American Football - English guys gave a good showing) You can get up to the usual beach activities such as burying people in the sand and sunbathing. Everything changes as you walk into the sea, as you instantly realise that this beach is in fact in one of the most populated cities in the world. The water is brown/grey, you can’t see through it. The seabed is slimy and one unlucky man even discovered that he had trodden on dirty underwear underneath. In conclusion - a lovely place to relax and a good break from the hustle and bustle of the city; just be wary of the water.
I’d like the chance to explore the rest of Lantau; it’s actually the biggest island in HK. There are a great number of hills and walking paths as well a better beaches tucked away on the other side if word is to be believed. On top of all that one of the biggest bronze Budda statues in the world (quite possibly THE biggest, but I won’t write that if I’m not certain) is to be found somewhere on it. Combined with Lamma Island and the New Territories, there is so much more to HK than simply Hong Kong Island and Kowloon and I’ll be well occupied by exploring this place.
I’m getting the chance to make some judgements and observations about HK now I’ve been here for more than a week or so. Firstly, Kowloon is my home and Hong Kong Island will never be the same to me. HK Island may have one the most impressive skylines in the world; it may well be the centre of most of the city’s financial and service work. It is the fashionable place to live, home of the super rich. However it doesn’t have the energy of Kowloon. More importantly, I get the feeling when I walk around Kowloon that this is where the roots, culture and history of the locals remains. On Wednesday I went shopping around the ladies market in Mong Kok, the most densely populated area in HK. There’s a shambolic feel to it with people living their lives on the streets. I don’t mean this in a homeless sort of way, just in the way that they’re living their normal lives and trying to make their money. Tsim Sha Tsui has the magnificent view over the HK Island skyline with a number of bars and other places to match. Move back from this front and you get a similar feeling to Mong Kok. You can eat out or go to a bar and you get the feeling that you’re living at least partially in a similar way to the locals, although obviously we don’t entirely. Truth be told if you really want to experience the real HK you have to go even deeper into Kowloon. I’ve now twice been to Kowloon Bay on the MTR, and there’s a great variety of shops and restaurants etc. as ever. However it’s one of the only places I’ve been to where I hardly see any other white people about, and I don’t feel so confident speaking English to people. I’d like the chance to spend more time around those sorts of areas, where you get more of a feel for how people in HK live. Kowloon Tong - my area - is far quieter than all the places I have described. We have to walk 15 minutes to our nearest bar, something I never thought possible in Hong Kong. We have to walk to Festival Walk for our shops and things like that. Instead, around where we live, we’re surrounded by wealthy commuters who don’t quite want to be right in the middle of everything when not in work. They pay millions for the view we get extremely cheap. There is another university near by and a hospital, but in general not too much happens on our particular street. Thankfully the MTR is only 5 minutes walk away and takes us wherever we want.
This brings me nicely onto the topic of what is surely one of the most efficient, easy to understand, comfortable and altogether amazing transport networks in the world. Nothing is ever late. If you need to change lines, you walk straight off one train onto the other side of the platform and board the next one. Inside everything is wonderfully air conditioned, whilst the maps are all lit up at the right times and incredibly easy to read. All this is available at an exceedingly cheap price. Then there is the Octopus card, which makes a joke of London’s Oyster card. It works on practically all pieces of public transport, but it goes further. It works in all 7-11’s (convenience stores found every 10 yards), it works in a lot of cafes, shops and indeed practically everywhere. When you want to buy something for HK$5 and don’t want to break your HK$100 note you can just hold it up against the reader and it’s sorted. It also works on vending machines, so when you need more water you can go up to any machine in a shopping centre or at the university, hold it up and get what you need, with no sort of extra fee. I’ll be truly spoilt by the convenience of this and the service the MTR provides, to the extent that when I’m back home and in London I won’t stop moaning about how pathetic everything is and how much better it is in HK.
Equally impressive is the price of food out here - and the standard if you’re lucky. From the uni’s cafeteria you can get a meal for about £1 and it will always fill you sufficiently. I’ve bought various meals there, all varying in standard despite similar prices. Some Chinese food I try really goes down well, where as some just seems very weird. I had one amazing meal with roast duck last week and decided to go for the same again on Thursday, only to discover it was very bony and generally crap. There’s quite a lot of luck involved, but it’s so cheap it’s worth it. When eating out more extravagantly (still never more than £5 a meal) I’ve tried some weird stuff. Following on from the hot pot on the opening night, I’ve now had my first ever sushi night. I tried the likes of eel, crab and raw salmon. It wasn’t as bold as I could have been, but I’m not normally a seafood fan so it was quite a big deal. It tasted good enough apart from when I was told that you’re meant to eat the wasabi source by itself as a starter. I’m just too trusting sometimes. I’ve also eaten jellyfish at another seafood restaurant. Considering I’ll sprint out of the sea if I think I see one within 10 yards of me I was surprised with myself. It doesn’t really have any taste, but it has the texture of crunchy jelly. I won’t be going near it again; I didn’t enjoy the feeling of it slipping down. I’m on the look out for more disgusting foods if possible. I believe snake is widely available if you know where to go, it’s even available in an alcoholic form called snake wine. I must find some; it’s a spirit with a dead snake floating in the bottle. If I go to Mainland China dog is on the menu, although I’m not sure if I could go as far as the infamous monkey brain.
Anyhow, teaching has started this week. One of the most noticeable things is how much you’re encouraged to drop modules. The lecturers really don’t seem to want us. From the 19th August, and finishing on Monday, changing modules has been very easy online with no complications, the logic being that if you really don’t like the sound of one of your modules in the first week you can change it. Makes perfect sense to me. The only change I’ve made has been dropping a module that has 3 hours a week, 8.30 - 10.30 on a Wednesday morning and 10.30 - 11.30 on a Thursday morning. Is any more explanation needed? If so, it seemed mind numbingly dull from the first lecture. The module title was Public Management in the Information Age. The title didn’t deceive. On top of this, it required a 45 minute presentation, a 3000 word essay, two 500 word reports and a 2 hour exam for a module that wasn’t particularly big. I don’t know what they expect from me, but if everybody pushed me that hard I’d be positively excited about my final year in Leeds by the time I got home. None of the other modules are quite so ridiculous with the work load. I was also the only exchange student and was going to have to do some group work, which would inevitably lead to my group talking Cantonese half the time and leaving me out. Apart from that nightmare of a module, it all seems to be okay.
The dropped module was an extreme case, but in general there does appear to be more expectation to work throughout the whole semester here. Many of my modules require me to do homework or undergo weekly tests (very short) on the reading I should have done. In both cases they will be assessed, and I’ll also have to do a couple of presentations. At home most of the work takes place in one month in the lead up to exams, maybe it’s just more spread out here and I’ll find that the exam period isn’t so intense. I just did a massive chunk of reading for one of my modules and it took a while. I was surprised to find that the standard of English and academic writing is just as good as it is back home - the local students must have to be seriously intelligent to read that sort of material in their second language. I’ve had a couple of classes in beginners Mandarin. It’s a ridiculous language, with very few words but 4 different tones for every single word. Each of them will have an entirely different meaning depending on the tone used. An example is “ma”, which can mean Mum, a horse, or the verb of scolding somebody depending upon the tone used. I can’t see myself ever trying to converse in it outside the classroom. Why can’t they just make 4 different words?
I’m sure that I’ll get into all my classes quickly enough and adapt to different ways of doing things. The lectures themselves are similar enough to what I have at home; an hour or two staring at my watch incessantly and occasionally struggling to stay awake. What makes CityU though is the outdoor swimming pool in the middle of the campus which I can go to between lectures or at the end of the day. I’ve gone there 4 or 5 times already to relax in the sun whilst exercising. It makes university feel like a holiday a bit. Think that’s all I’m writing for now. I’m going to Macau at the weekend, apparently Asia’s Las Vegas. I’ll give a decent run down of my time once I’m back. Once again I can’t fit all my thoughts down but I’m hoping that I’ll have the chance to get it all down at some point. Until then, hope everything’s all okay back home. Rob.
P.s. I’m really bad at taking photos so everything down here is from Google, but the areas I’m describing do actually look like that.
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Claire Spencer
non-member comment
Wow! Sounds like you are having an amazing time out there already, hope the rest of the year goes just as well :) Sounds as though you might have a little trouble settling back in here though with our dodgy buses :P Praying for you xxx