Sunday, sunday... and other tales
Sunday – the day of writing a new post- came and went without me doing really anything. The sun woke me up– it shines through my balcony door. It was pretty late, but I haven’t felt as rested in days. We went shopping with the guys to Po Lam, which has a huge shopping center (as does every MTR station here, but this is truly huge). Bought some kitchen equipment and a grill for barbecuing on our rooftop terrace- Erkki was completely hung-over having come back from town at 6 a.m. the previous night… and he is a complete shopaholic (krapulapaivashoppaaja) when hung-over…. It was fun!
In the evening I did some homework assignments and tried to catch up with my correspondence- although haven’t gotten far yet. And now it is Monday and another week has started- the weather is great: summer- or so I have decided since I have no dry clothes except skirts (which I now wear regardless of everyone else running around in winter jackets- ridiculous at 20C!) Elections for the university clubs are coming up and the whole atrium looks like a exhibition fair – the organized chaos and space problems of Areena messut but much, much noisier, with cheerleader-type teams dressed in Chinese colorful silk dresses shouting Cantonese slogans. And a lot of people in suits handing out flyers (although not to the Caucasians) and juice bottles. It is hilariously confusing. Wow, I can’t believe they take it so serious! (I’ll try to get a picture tomorrow…)
Below a little summary of the last couple of days, and I do not want to go into listing:
Feb 3 (Thursday)
Had two amazing classes: Derivative securities and Time series modeling and forecasting: I like the professors. It will all be good!
Ran 4km on the track (and this I report only because I promised to).
Feb 4 (Friday)
The Big Buddha (Big B)
HK has over 200 islands and we went to one of them on Friday: Lantau Island in the West of HK, which hosts the HK Disneyland (there were riots last week cause the Chinese love it and more tickets were sold than capacity allowed, so they shut the gates at 10 a.m. which lead to people climbing over the fences…) and the international airport (on an huge landfill, very common in HK). We didn’t see neither but went to the Po Lin monastery and the Big Buddha in the mountains – a bit commercialized for my taste, but well, gotta see it. The island is huge and mountainous – we took a ferry from HK island and then a bus (travel time one-way: 2h+), which was great sightseeing but also exhausting. I got quite annoyed with everyone since the whole thing was so unorganized: if you don’t know where to go just don’t go at all!
Feb 5 (Saturday)
I saw a monkey!
An amazing day that started with mist and rain. We met with Martin (from Sweden) at Uni at 9 a.m. and then took the bus to Sai Kung, which is a fishing village whith great seafood restaurants just in the next bay from the university. We had decided to go hiking “somewhere in the east of HK” on one of the numerous trails- again no plan of where or how, but when I do something with him, we are always lucky. After some searching we found the right bus stop in Sai Kung and saw a group of young people standing around. We started talking to one of them and it turned out that he was an architecture student from Melbourne on holidays at home and now leading is former boys’ scouts group for a hike. We asked if we could join – the kids looked pretty young so we thought the tour might be pretty easy. Lucky us…. I have gone to talking to everyone on bus stops and in shops, but often they refer you to someone else or do not understand (and you meet really crazy people here) - but not this time!
We went with them by bus to a nature park close by- public transport here is really superb and brings you right at the start of the paths which are well marked with distance signs every 500 meters, maps and lookout points. As I have been told, the HKese love hiking and there are a lot of events, e.g. once a year a 100km hike which has to be completed within 48h (and it draws thousands of participants)- people here are crazy!
Anyway, it turned out that we were supposed to hike 25km!!!! 25km!!!! CRAZY! Well, of course I said OK and off we went. The highest point of the trail – the McLehose trail (former British HK governor) - was around 430m: we crossed also several beaches and 7 other mountains. So it was more like 25km up and down and up and down…. We did the trail in 5.5 h which is over 5 km an hour with a huge difference in altitude…. I don’t know how I did it (I am sooo proud!)- I had no proper clothing, was pretty exhausted in the end and my legs still hurt (and it is Monday!) but every step was worth it! We saw the prettiest beaches of HK with fine white sand, met a small colony of U.S. surfers, saw wild monkeys in the forest, abandoned fishing villages and got a lot of useful info from our HK/Oz student. And most of all: it was silent! No noise, no buzz, no people (it is winter now and low-season). How relaxing. I never thought I would have become so Finnish!
Total distance walked this week: 30 km +
Other stuff:
Shopping
Going into supermarkets, you can find everything in terms of food. The music in the background is pretty horrible: it is Chinese (I think) and a bit shrill and VERY loud. The same goes for malls: when you pass a store selling any electronics, be prepared to interrupt all conversation and mentally close your ears, since you won’t be able to hear anything. The music as such is not bad, but combined with a mass of people in shopping carts boxing their way through and you desperately trying to find something it can be pretty annoying. It is really about going through every aisle and searching since the system of store design is quite different depending on the chain. In some stores everything is grouped by origin, i.e. Japanese food, Western food and everything else which means you have to look for dairy in three places since you don’t know which is classified as which. In other stores you have just aisles of different sorts of rice or soy sauce, living fish in aquariums and huge refrigerators full of dim sum. Everything classified as “not needed by anyone non-Cantonese/Mandarin speaking” (don’t know though how this classification is determined) such as washing powder has only Mandarin labels which makes searching a bit more time consuming and difficult. But it is also fun just looking at all the packages and different foods. And the plasma screens in front of the shelves advertising the product stacked behind it.
Transport
The MTR and buses all have plasma TVs, which is really high tech. And they are very, very clean. I know, I said this before, but I just think it is absolutely amazing given the amount of people transported every day. I have gone to using single fare tickets with “concessionary” fares- might be illegal, I don’t know… but it is cheaper!
Our village and the guys
To avoid further misunderstanding: yes, I live with two guys from Finland, not only one. Erkki is the one guy who already appeared in previous posts, a Finance student but kind of funny and makes very good spaghetti Bolognese (given the Chinese ingredients). Jussi, Logistics major, is half Indonesian/Chinese, half Finnish. He was in Indonesia for two weeks but got back last week. Unfortunately he got sick immediately (stomach messed up) - a destiny that I await with agony! He is generally classified as “cute” by all Asian girls I have so far talked to – and he is good in cleaning the floors of our apartment (that is what we did yesterday).
The village we live in is pretty small, but cozy. A lot of the life takes place in the streets with washing machines, laundry, barbecues, pets etc. on the streets. We managed to get our laundry line on the roof, so now everything hopefully dries a bit faster. People often meet at the local store- the infamous crazy guy of the village is Pierre du Bois a.k.a Peter from Britain, a white headed British gentleman always dressed in a suit and completely drunk, who has lived here with his golden retriever for over 30 years. He has some interesting stories, too…
In the evening I did some homework assignments and tried to catch up with my correspondence- although haven’t gotten far yet. And now it is Monday and another week has started- the weather is great: summer- or so I have decided since I have no dry clothes except skirts (which I now wear regardless of everyone else running around in winter jackets- ridiculous at 20C!) Elections for the university clubs are coming up and the whole atrium looks like a exhibition fair – the organized chaos and space problems of Areena messut but much, much noisier, with cheerleader-type teams dressed in Chinese colorful silk dresses shouting Cantonese slogans. And a lot of people in suits handing out flyers (although not to the Caucasians) and juice bottles. It is hilariously confusing. Wow, I can’t believe they take it so serious! (I’ll try to get a picture tomorrow…)
Below a little summary of the last couple of days, and I do not want to go into listing:
Feb 3 (Thursday)
Had two amazing classes: Derivative securities and Time series modeling and forecasting: I like the professors. It will all be good!
Ran 4km on the track (and this I report only because I promised to).
Feb 4 (Friday)
The Big Buddha (Big B)
HK has over 200 islands and we went to one of them on Friday: Lantau Island in the West of HK, which hosts the HK Disneyland (there were riots last week cause the Chinese love it and more tickets were sold than capacity allowed, so they shut the gates at 10 a.m. which lead to people climbing over the fences…) and the international airport (on an huge landfill, very common in HK). We didn’t see neither but went to the Po Lin monastery and the Big Buddha in the mountains – a bit commercialized for my taste, but well, gotta see it. The island is huge and mountainous – we took a ferry from HK island and then a bus (travel time one-way: 2h+), which was great sightseeing but also exhausting. I got quite annoyed with everyone since the whole thing was so unorganized: if you don’t know where to go just don’t go at all!
Feb 5 (Saturday)
I saw a monkey!
An amazing day that started with mist and rain. We met with Martin (from Sweden) at Uni at 9 a.m. and then took the bus to Sai Kung, which is a fishing village whith great seafood restaurants just in the next bay from the university. We had decided to go hiking “somewhere in the east of HK” on one of the numerous trails- again no plan of where or how, but when I do something with him, we are always lucky. After some searching we found the right bus stop in Sai Kung and saw a group of young people standing around. We started talking to one of them and it turned out that he was an architecture student from Melbourne on holidays at home and now leading is former boys’ scouts group for a hike. We asked if we could join – the kids looked pretty young so we thought the tour might be pretty easy. Lucky us…. I have gone to talking to everyone on bus stops and in shops, but often they refer you to someone else or do not understand (and you meet really crazy people here) - but not this time!
We went with them by bus to a nature park close by- public transport here is really superb and brings you right at the start of the paths which are well marked with distance signs every 500 meters, maps and lookout points. As I have been told, the HKese love hiking and there are a lot of events, e.g. once a year a 100km hike which has to be completed within 48h (and it draws thousands of participants)- people here are crazy!
Anyway, it turned out that we were supposed to hike 25km!!!! 25km!!!! CRAZY! Well, of course I said OK and off we went. The highest point of the trail – the McLehose trail (former British HK governor) - was around 430m: we crossed also several beaches and 7 other mountains. So it was more like 25km up and down and up and down…. We did the trail in 5.5 h which is over 5 km an hour with a huge difference in altitude…. I don’t know how I did it (I am sooo proud!)- I had no proper clothing, was pretty exhausted in the end and my legs still hurt (and it is Monday!) but every step was worth it! We saw the prettiest beaches of HK with fine white sand, met a small colony of U.S. surfers, saw wild monkeys in the forest, abandoned fishing villages and got a lot of useful info from our HK/Oz student. And most of all: it was silent! No noise, no buzz, no people (it is winter now and low-season). How relaxing. I never thought I would have become so Finnish!
Total distance walked this week: 30 km +
Other stuff:
Shopping
Going into supermarkets, you can find everything in terms of food. The music in the background is pretty horrible: it is Chinese (I think) and a bit shrill and VERY loud. The same goes for malls: when you pass a store selling any electronics, be prepared to interrupt all conversation and mentally close your ears, since you won’t be able to hear anything. The music as such is not bad, but combined with a mass of people in shopping carts boxing their way through and you desperately trying to find something it can be pretty annoying. It is really about going through every aisle and searching since the system of store design is quite different depending on the chain. In some stores everything is grouped by origin, i.e. Japanese food, Western food and everything else which means you have to look for dairy in three places since you don’t know which is classified as which. In other stores you have just aisles of different sorts of rice or soy sauce, living fish in aquariums and huge refrigerators full of dim sum. Everything classified as “not needed by anyone non-Cantonese/Mandarin speaking” (don’t know though how this classification is determined) such as washing powder has only Mandarin labels which makes searching a bit more time consuming and difficult. But it is also fun just looking at all the packages and different foods. And the plasma screens in front of the shelves advertising the product stacked behind it.
Transport
The MTR and buses all have plasma TVs, which is really high tech. And they are very, very clean. I know, I said this before, but I just think it is absolutely amazing given the amount of people transported every day. I have gone to using single fare tickets with “concessionary” fares- might be illegal, I don’t know… but it is cheaper!
Our village and the guys
To avoid further misunderstanding: yes, I live with two guys from Finland, not only one. Erkki is the one guy who already appeared in previous posts, a Finance student but kind of funny and makes very good spaghetti Bolognese (given the Chinese ingredients). Jussi, Logistics major, is half Indonesian/Chinese, half Finnish. He was in Indonesia for two weeks but got back last week. Unfortunately he got sick immediately (stomach messed up) - a destiny that I await with agony! He is generally classified as “cute” by all Asian girls I have so far talked to – and he is good in cleaning the floors of our apartment (that is what we did yesterday).
The village we live in is pretty small, but cozy. A lot of the life takes place in the streets with washing machines, laundry, barbecues, pets etc. on the streets. We managed to get our laundry line on the roof, so now everything hopefully dries a bit faster. People often meet at the local store- the infamous crazy guy of the village is Pierre du Bois a.k.a Peter from Britain, a white headed British gentleman always dressed in a suit and completely drunk, who has lived here with his golden retriever for over 30 years. He has some interesting stories, too…
posted by Crazy Night Rider at 6:28 PM
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