SHOPPING AND GETTING LOST

The last couple of days I’ve actually had time to go shopping and exploring the city. Unfortunately, by shopping I mean trying desperately find basic necessities such as sheets, towels, plates, cutlery etc, and by exploring I mean running around for 45 minutes trying to find the right bus back to Uni… Well it wasn’t quite that bad actually! The Uni and accommodation are really close to city centre: the bus from here to city centre takes about 10 minutes and the buses run pretty much all the time. The public transport is quite convenient, aside of buses there’s the underground a.k.a Mass Transit Railway a.k.a. MTR, trams which are slow and not airconditioned, but the cheapest option (not that anything here is particularly expensive). Oh and they are the only double-decker trams in the world! Also taxis are dead cheap here. Funnily enough, in my shopping/exploring/getting badly lost -trip today I managed to use all of the transport methods mentioned above…

There are not many exchange students in HKU yet, we weren’t actually given any specific date to arrive so people sort of keep appearing whenever. I was here quite early because wanted to get to know the places a bit before Uni starts and all the crazyness and busyness kicks in. My hall is still very quiet so to have some company I met up with a German girl called Diana yesterday. She needed help getting a sim card which I already had, and I needed help finding stuff for my room, which she had already done so we decided to combine our knowledge for a highly successful shopping trip!


LOST IN TRANSLATION…

At this point, it might be worth mentioning that despite English being the other official language of Hong Kong and the main language used in HKU, most things still happen in Cantonese and there are many people who actually don’t understand a word of English (including most bus drivers, taxi drivers, people at my Hall’s reception and some University staff), and even those who speak English prefer to use Cantonese (for example most of my flatmates). It doesn’t bother me, but has made me reconsider if I should start learning Cantonese instead of continuing Mandarin (for those who don’t know, they are the main types of Chinese and despite being written approximately same, are spoken completely differently). If I did do Cantonese, it would sort of mean my studying of Mandarin would be sort of wasted, and also Cantonese is more difficult… but it would be soooo useful here, I would love to be able to go to a restaurant and order food in Cantonese, especially when I’ll have people from home visiting me. Well I still have a couple of weeks to decide my courses… any advice will be welcome! :)

The rest of the weekend will hopefully contain more exploring of the city, so the numerous questions ‘So what’s Hong Kong like?’ will finally be answered. The best word at the moment seems to be: overwhelming. But definately in a good way :)