Advertisement
Published: November 4th 2012
Edit Blog Post
Hong Kong Skyline
A view of the Hong Kong Skyline with some of our group It was no less than 4 AM last Saturday when I thought I heard a bomb go off. The good news is that it was just my alarm, yelling at me to wake up so I could start packing. By 5:30 AM, all 26 of us plus our two program directors were on a bus to the airport, ready for a week of traveling to Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau, and Zhuhai.
My airplane buddy on the plane flight to Guangzhou was quite the interesting fellow. My dad once mentioned that at some point during his life he had a perm, and although I have never seen any pictures, I imagine the guy I sat next to on the airplane looked just like how my dad did--an Asian man with a perm. He and I talked for a while, but after 15-20 minutes we had run through all of the Chinese that I knew.
Once on the ground, it was off to a Cantonese restaurant, where the food was chicken brain and snails. Not exactly the Cantonese food I eat at home. After we were full from our chicken feet, we toured the fourth largest brewery in the world--Zhujiang. 190
Looks Just Like My Dad
I've never seen the picture of my dad when he had a perm, but I imagine he probably looked something like my plane buddy. powerpoint slides later and some water that they were passing off as beer, it was finally time to check into our four star hotel. After two and a half months sleeping on a Chinese style bed, I was passed out in seconds when we realized the beds in the hotel were Westernized beds. Most likely the best sleep I've had in two and a half months.
Sunday was our tour of museums in Guangzhou. Although many people think they haven't heard of Guangzhou, they have. To some westerners it is known as Canton (a Portugese name). Regardless of the name, almost every single factory is in the Guangzhou province, which means all of your computers, sunglasses, clothes, and whatever else that has a "made in China" label was made in Guangzhou.
After touring the city (the city has a cool 14+ million people), we visited the Ancestral Temple of the Chen Family. If I had a dollar for everyone in the group that asked me if this was my ancestral temple, I'd have about 26 dollars (aka the number of people on our program). I'm not sure how they got "Chen" from my last name. Finally it was
dinner time, and the meal was no less than frog and goose and a plethora of other Cantonese delicacies.
Monday was the day we were all waiting for--off to Hong Kong! After a brief visit at the world's largest Chinese pharmaceutical company, we boarded a ferry for Hong Kong. Once we finished dinner, we were taken to The Peak--Hong Kong's most popular attraction. Although slightly foggy, we could see the entire city, harbor, and mountains. It was amazing!
Hong Kong reminded me a lot of London. Although the British left in 1997, you can still see how much they have influenced Hong Kong. The first thing I noticed (besides the fact that they drive on the wrong side of the road) was that they call their underground cards "octopus cards". When I saw that, I was thinking "that is the weirdest thing to name a metro card" until I remembered that the London underground cards are called "oyster cards". Get it? They are both sea creatures that start with the letter O? Took me a while to get that one. A lot of the locals speak English, although they have the slightest British accents. Small things like that
Smoking Chicken
Playing with our food in a local restaurant remind you that they were under British control for 156 years.
I think my favorite day of the week was Tuesday. It started off with a dim sum breakfast (I have to say, the dim sum place that is three minutes from my house was better) and then we visited the Golden Bauhinia Square. The square was were the British officially handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997. It was dumping rain, but it was still cool to see the square for about 30 seconds before we ran back into the bus for shelter. We also toured Lantau Island, which is home to the world's largest bronze Buddha. While in Asia, I have heard a million places that are home to the world's largest Buddha. "This place has the world's largest bronze Buddha". "This place has the world's largest standing Buddha". "This place has the world's largest carved stone Buddha". If you add enough specifics to it, I guess it is the world's best. Anyways, after seeing "the world's largest" Buddha, we had another questionable dinner before heading off to the Symphony of Lights.
Halloween, Wednesday, was our free day. By this point in time, we were
all exhausted from not having a moment to spare, and it was dumping rain, so we spent the day wandering around the city and doing some shopping. We tried to have dinner on Wednesday night but it was so crowded for Halloween that you couldn't walk anywhere! We were definitely not expecting that.
The day after Halloween was November 1st. Duh. The problem with November 1st, is that starting on November 1st in Macau (our next destination), you have to be 21 or older to gamble in the casinos. For those that don't know, Macau is like Las Vegas on steroids, but designed for the extremely wealthy Asians. I had no real desire to gamble, but just the fact that I wasn't allowed to starting on the only day we were in Macau was frustrating. Out of the 26 of us (28 if you include the two program directors), only four of us were under 21, so while everyone went out to the casinos, the four of us "cool kids" called it an early night (thank goodness Asia Shark Week is in November!)
Friday we were off to Zhuhai, a place in mainland China I had never heard
Macau Tower
While in Macau, we went to the tallest tower in the city, where we dined in a rotating buffet that gave us a 360 degree view of the city. The best part? The buffet had cheesecake! of. It was a small city with only 1.4 million people, and it looked more like a developing city than any other place we had been to. Again, we stayed at a 4 star hotel, and since there was really nothing in Zhuhai, we spent the evening in the hot springs before heading back to Shanghai the next day, thoroughly exhausted.
I had very mixed feelings about the trip. On one hand, I loved that we got to see Southern China. It's very different from the parts of China I've already seen--it is definitely not as developed as Shanghai or Beijing. I also loved that Babson paid for the entire trip, four star hotels and all. It was also nice to be out of the classroom for a week, although we were still with a teacher. She went on all of our field trips with us, and I learned a lot of cool phrases in Mandarin, like how to say "that sounds like a personal problem" or "next semester I am going to swim with a whale shark". I also taught her how to say "that sounds like a personal problem", but forgot to teach her when to use
Good Looking Group Of People
This week we have to give a presentation of what we learned about in Hong Kong, so our group took a picture at one of the companies we visited. it, so when she said it to a student in our program, everyone obviously knew I had taught it to her. We all had a blast though. However, I was very disappointed with the trip overall in that it was called a "field study trip" only I don't think I learned anything scholarly from it. We had at least one company visit every day, where we would spend several hours there. We were led to believe that it would be a chance for us to ask excecutives about their marketing strategies, and I had a lot of questions I had hoped to ask different companies about how they adapted their foreign versus domestic business plans for the different industries. However, our program director didn't execute the week as well as he could have, and many companies were surprised that we had shown up at their doorstep and thus gave us the receptionists to tour us around the public areas. We did not get much background knowledge and had no opportunity to ask in depth questions. When we did have in depth questions to ask, no one's English was good enough to understand us or none of us could ask in Cantonese, so we had a huge language barrier issue. I wish we had just scraped the company visits and had more time to stay in Hong Kong, and instead visited more corporations in Shanghai. Thank goodness Babson paid for this trip!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.186s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 10; qc: 49; dbt: 0.0498s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Kirsteen
non-member comment
Just browsing
Hi just browsing, in Macau do they actually check your ID's? normally they are lax about that sort of thing in Asia.