#20160515

"Không ai hiểu Vì sao tình yêu tan vỡ Như hoa ven mặt hồ Tàn theo gió mùa thu"

Ừ thì cũng chẳng biết vì sao nữa ... Thẹn thùng, chưa một lần dám nhìn thẳng mặt, chưa một cái ôm, chưa một lần nắm tay

肖战DAYTOY 2016-05-15 22:46 iPhone 6s

SEM Lady Bird

© Power and Syred/Science Photo Library

Greetsiel Muehlen

Since I’m half way through my summer break (spending it back home in my own overly messy room but with a more comfortable bed), I thought I’d share some of my thoughts of having spent an entire semester on exchange in HK.

Honestly the most important factor that determines your mood is the weather. Although I’m a university student in New Zealand, I’m an international student and I live somewhere along the equator when school’s out. This means that I’m used to extremely warm and humid weather, but I don’t think it prepared me for HK’s winter.

The thing is, I have been to HK quite a few times, many of those visits were in winter. Being there for a few days to a week is definitely different from being there for an entire semester, through winter, spring and then summer.

Oh my goodness I happened to be there during the coldest winter in 60 years and it was zero degrees celcius. Since my school is located in the New Territories and along mountains (......), it’s even colder there. There’s no centralised heating or air conditioning in HK, which is one thing to note. Another is that since I’m in the mountains, I rarely ever saw the sun (or anything outside my window) for as long as three weeks. It was just mist and nothing and the dreary weather does something to your psyche. It’s just so hard to cheer up when the weather is determined to pull you down.

Weather for winter was pretty good though, apart from not having heating (you pay $1 per hour if you want that). It wasn’t that bad since I had an electric blanket but when I’m spending time in my room, I still had a winter jacket on.

The next thing is language. I don’t speak Cantonese but I do speak Mandarin. Most of the time I spoke English on campus since all of my classes were in English. I really did try to learn Cantonese for an entire semester but I think I’m just hopeless at the dialect. Ahhhh. I mean, I tried, and I got a C for that subject, but hey, I tried and that’s what matters.

Food is pretty darn expensive in HK, every meal I have never comes below $100HKD (eg. Japanese ramen is around ~$110HKD after additional charges). There is a canteen at my college (hostel), but it’s closed on Sundays so it kinda forces me out.

School can be stifling. The work honestly isn’t that hard nor is the workload heavy. I was pretty surprised that the difficulty was equitable to that in New Zealand. I expected it to be a lot later since the syllabus in Asian countries are usually more tough (I’d know. I was educated there :’).)

Transport is pretty ok as long as wherever you’re going is near a MTR station. The only time I ever took a bus was when I went to the outlet mall at Horizons (?). I don’t know if I’ll ever dare to venture out to the unknown by taking mini buses alone.

I usually spend time in the following areas - Shatin, Mongkok, Tsim Sha Tsui, Causeway Bay and Shenzhen.

When I discovered that my school was just a few stations away from Shenzhen, I took the opportunity and went as many times as I possibly could without stretching myself too thin. I mainly went for food, movies and KTV. Food was half the price for the same thing compared to HK, movies were half the price and KTV was extremely cheap.