Noticing Things

Just a few notes about Hong Kong, CUHK and Morningside in general

• MTR motto: Be aggressive. When the train arrives you're supposed to stand to the left or right to let passengers off first, but this never happens. If you have a seat, don't offer it to anyone. That's just weird.
• Buttons in elevators, hand rails on escalators, and even some vending machines have little laminated signs stating how many times per day the surface is disinfected. (Residual cautionary measures from the SARS outbreak).
• People cough and sneeze without covering their mouth. (SARS? Meh)
• Announcements (general): 
• 'The train for .... is arriving. Please let passengers exit first' (MTR platforms)
• 'Please hold the handrail' (MTR stations everywhere)
• 'Mind the doors, please' (Pentecostal elevator)
• 'Please mind the gap' (MTR)
• 'Next station: University. ... and be aware of the difference in levels between the platform and the train' (Specifically for University Station)
• 'Toast' in Cantonese is 'doh-see'. This is useful for ordering $7 toast from Morningside Canteen at 8:30am when none of the English-speaking staff are at work yet. 'Jam' is 'jim'.
• Try Almond Milk Tea. Just try it.
• Sheung Wan is a beautiful neighborhood with lots of galleries and design shops and people walking their dogs on warm April evenings. It also has lots of stairs. 
• Elsa, the lady who runs Cafe Liscio (Tower Block, Morningside College) is a dear - she will make you vegetarian croissants or ciabatta rolls, and if you order something that doesn't quite fit the lunch specials, she will give you a discount anyway.
• Local students will steal your food from the fridge.
• International students will steal your food from the fridge. It sucks, but it happens.
• Lan Kwai Fong on a Saturday night is a must, but be prepared to come back smelling like smoke and alcohol, even if you don't drink or smoke.
• Eating hotpot is a must, but be prepared to come back smelling like hotpot.
• Catch a minibus. Don't worry about where it goes, it's the ride that counts! (Trust me)
• Catch a double-decker bus and sit up the front. (There are several buses that run from Shatin to the Airport, which is probably where you will best experience it). It feels like you are in the front seat of a rollercoaster.
• Don't tip. Don't even think about leaving change. At almost all restaurants you are charged a 10% service fee, so if you leave money, it's just weird.
• If you are at Morningside, during communal dinner, just once sit with the Master. He gets really lonely at his table sometimes. Plus, if you sit with him you get wine with your meal!
• Get annoyed at the Chung Chi College student who loudly practice tug-of-war until 1am on week nights.
• The local students are absolutely lovely, but expect them to always be talking about how much they want to sleep, and how much they hate studying.
• The Park-n-Shop sells Devondale milk, Flora spread, and Cadbury chocolate. Enough said.
• The Hong Kong Central Library in Wan Chai is beautiful.
• From CUHK, it is quicker to get to China than it is to get to Central. Take advantage of this. I should probably write a post about that... Anyway, Shenzhen has some excellent 24 hour spas (kind of like Korean jimjilbang) - the best being Water Cube and Queen Spa. (I went to both. Both had free all-you-can-eat fruit, soft drink and icecream!)
• Buy a jacket or jumper of your college. Morningside's is purple and says 'Once a Morningsider, Always a Morningsider'.
• The University Health Clinic is not just for students. It opens only on week days from 8:45am. If you arrive at 9, the wait time is already half an hour. BUT prescriptions are free!

Enrollment

So, this will be a bit of a boring post for those of you not interested in actually attending CUHK, because this is all about enrollment and subjects and the agreements between Adelaide Uni and CUHK about exchange students etc etc etc.

Back in November (when we had a million other things to do) we also had to 'pre-enrol' in our prospective subjects. It basically guaranteed us a place in the subjects we wanted to take at CUHK, which was great and it gave me a sense of security. HOWEVER, having spent hours in the previous weeks planning a perfect timetable with a wonderful balance of subjects, we were told in the pre-enrollment email that there is a 'list' of subjects for exchange students to pre-enroll in - NOT ALL SUBJECTS were open to us for pre-enrollment. Unfortunately for me, Japanese Language and Korean Language were not on the list of classes available for pre-enrollment, and after sending an email to CUHK about it, they replied that my only option would be to wait until I arrived at the university and hope that there would be places available in the classes I wanted.

So that's what I did. I pre-enrolled in four courses (the minimum number of subjects the Humanities Dept. at Adelaide Uni allows for exchange students to CUHK), two of which I wanted to take - Semantics and Language Disorders - and two which I thought I might drop if I could enroll in the language courses.

The next issue that came up was to do with the number of subjects I would take. It seems every university has a different agreement with CUHK regarding how many units at CUHK corresponds to how many of their institutions units/credits. My friend from LaTrobe University in Melbourne is doing four subjects of 3 units (most non-law, non-specialist undergraduate courses at CUHK are 3 units), which equates to four subjects of 3 units  back at LaTrobe. Simple.
For REASONS UNKNOWN, Humanities and Social Sciences Dept at Adelaide Uni has decided that your average full-time, 12 unit semester is equivalent to 16 units at CUHK. That means taking SIX subjects at CUHK! Note that six is the maximum number of subjects any student at CUHK can enroll in in one semester. It is ridiculous because I find the workload for each subject here to be pretty much the same as at Adelaide. Where they pulled the 16 unit requirement from I have no idea. But after a week experiencing the workload for classes here, I sent an email to HUMSS arguing that five subjects (15 units) should suffice to be equivalent to full time study, and they agreed.

After chopping and changing subjects and trying to figure out which department back in Adelaide will give me credit for which subjects (that part still hasn't quite been worked out, but I hope to credit for a subject of generic HUMSS, two Linguistics subjects and an Asian Studies subject) the following is the list of subjects I am enrolled in and that I now cannot drop (as the add/drop period is over):

Language Disorders
Semantics
English as an L2
Korean II
IASP Senior Seminar

Japanese is a long story. Cut short. I was able to enroll in a Japanese class that I thought and that the Japanese teacher thought was appropriate for my level. The grammar and vocabulary was familiar, but they were expected to learn/know 50 kanji a week and speak every class - two skills which I thought would keep me very busy! After attending Japanese classes for two weeks and trying to finalise enrollment (there were pieces of paper involved, very low-tech)... it didn't happen. There was something to do with my grammar being too advanced for that class. There was something to do with the exam only being in Chinese (then why they offered classes where the medium of instruction was English is beyond me). Basically, it was all very weird and with different teachers signing different forms and not agreeing with each other, it is not an experience I want anyone else to go through.

Korean on the other hand was totally different. I went to the head of department's office, gave her the form for the class I though was my level, and she said 'Well, introduce yourself in Korean'. So I did. She said for me to review the chapters already covered in the textbook, and she signed the form. Done.

Movie Night

So, Wednesday night is movie night here at Morningside College, and tonight we watched that seminal American tale One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. I read the book years ago, and while I was in high school the year 12 drama students did a performance of it, which was absolutely brilliant. So, seeing the movie for the first time, finally, was excellent.

In the Tower Block (where I live) on the Upper Ground Floor we have a TV Room with lots of comfy sofas and armchairs and a big flatscreen TV. Anyone in the college can use the TV room, unless it has been booked for an event.  Once Lavinia (an exchange student from Melbourne) and I tried to watch a movie from her hard drive (because the TV has a USB port), but we couldn't quite get it to work. The TV has regular HK channels, but there is information circulating about the possibility of getting cable channels, depending on the cost and if the college can find the money for it. The package being considered is the NOW TV Sports package, which has the rights for the English Premier League and the FA Cup, as well as other channels like Discovery Channel and Al Jazeera English. So, perhaps by the time next semester rolls around, you'll have cable!

The guy who organised the Movie Night, Edwin (a local student, pretty sure he's a graduate student...) bought a DVD player and a speaker to play tonight's movie, so I guess that's the most reliable option. And because he applied for funding for the movie nights, we had snacks (chips, Pocky, Maltesers etc), plus juice, and even a bottle of red AND a bottle of white! Of course, those who didn't think to bring wine glasses drank red wine from plastic cups. After the movie he asked us that if we had any requests for what we would like to watch next week, then just send him an email and he will try to find it. He gets the DVDs from United College's Media Library, so it's all legal and above board for the college to have us all sit around using college property to watch movies.

Normally I wouldn't be able to make the movie night because I have Kung Fu lessons on Wednesday nights, but I didn't go this week because I am sort-of getting over/sort-of still in the midst of a cold (blocked sinuses, in case you were wondering), so two hours of martial arts was just not going to happen.

Kung Fu

Neo: I know Kung Fu.
Sophie: So do I.

OK, so maybe I don't really know Kung Fu quite yet, but the last two nights I have been going to Kung Fu classes organised by IASP and taught by the brilliant Shane Yan. I really enjoyed it - so much so that I have signed up for 6 weeks of classes! I've never been really interested in martial arts (apart from my love of the the Matrix movies) and so when I signed up for just the 3-evening short course, my only thought was that it would be good exercise. But Shane is a great teacher, and we use a little bit of Mandarin in class (just for greetings and counting the moves and for some positions) so it feels good to hear and use the little Mandarin I remember. It's weird how, even though I can hardly speak or read any Mandarin, after listening to it twice a week for ten years in school, it feels far more comfortable than Cantonese, which I listen to every day.

The exchange program at CUHK - the International Asian Studies Program - is really REALLY well organised. Although before you arrive here it might seem like they are really slow to process documents and then they require a hundred things from you in a week, once you arrive it's a different story. There are free tours organised during the Orientation Week (the trip to Stanley I wrote about also included stops at Victoria Peak, Aberdeen and Avenue of Stars), but all through the semester the people in the i-Centre who run the IASP send you emails about upcoming events and opportunities and tours and all sorts of other good things. There has been a trip to the Hong Kong History Museum, and a trip to the Hong Kong Museum of Art (Warhol's 15 Minutes Eternal was showing). This short-course Kung Fu was $200 for 3 1hr lessons. On Saturday I'm going on an excursion to the 'Big Budda and Tai O Village', with Vegetarian Lunch included, for just $175. For me, this set up of having lots of things organised by someone else and letting me pick and choose the activities I want to try is FANTASTIC! I don't have the time or the inclination to search out the best yoga studios in the city, or where to hire the cheapest bike etc - but note that if you DO want to do these things, chances are other students in the IASP program would want to do it (we are all part of a Facebook group, so every day there are new requests by students asking if anyone knows where is the best place is to do certain sports or activities).

So, all in all, things are going well here. My 5 subjects have been finalised and I'm into a routine of going to classes, studying, seeing friends, and doing activities that I can remember as: I did that in Hong Kong.

Breakfast

Just wanted to share with you my typical breakfast, all purchased from the Park N Shop supermarket on campus: normally fruit, yoghurt and crackers with nutella or peanut butter (they only have Skippy brand).

Bananas, oranges, mandarins, about 5 kinds of apples, red grapes, dragonfruit and a few kinds of pear are available at the Park N Shop, and depending on the day/time of day, with varying degrees of quality. Note: you won't find bananas after 6pm - they sell out pretty quick. Also at the supermarket, every shelf has a little flag on it to show you where the product is from if it is imported, so if you are really picky about your food and where it comes from, at least that helps.

Also, as cute as these little milk cartons look, note they are not vanilla flavour, or malt flavour - they are plain soymilk. I had bought the same brand in a brown pack before, and it was chocolate soy milk, so I guess I just thought all that brand was flavoured. But plain soymilk as a snack? It just isn't to my taste.

Normally I buy a few days supply of breakfast, but the supermarket is open every day until 9pm or 11pm, so it's pretty convenient if you have just finished your homework and have a craving for pistachios or chocolate milk.

Drinks, ladders, plants

Just a few observations I wanted to record before heading to my Semantics tutorial.

Vending Machines are pretty plentiful around campus, not only inside the buildings, but also outside (like this one outside Sir Run Run Shaw Hall). But it seems that MOST vending machines only dispense drinks (both hot and cold), not food. The only one with food I've seen so far is in the Maurice Greenberg building of Morningside College, which has chips, chocolate and cup noodles. Maybe I should make a list of the locations of all food vending machines....
Oh, and most vending machines take Octopus Card. 

Moving on to ladders. This isn't really CUHK-specific, but growing up in Australia where few people live in apartments, ladders such as these (with the cage around them) was something I only saw on American TV. My question: why is there a cage around the ladder?

(Picture: behind the Y. C. Liang Hall)

Finally, greenery. One thing to love about HK is that wherever there is the tiniest bit of space for a tree, shrub or potted plant, there will be a tree, shrub or potted plant! For example, between two power-generation-machine-things to the right of Y. C Liang Hall.

And at Hong Kong University too! (photo courtesy of Aleksis)

Bad Morning

Sometimes you have a bad morning. The bus driver closes the door on you while you are getting out and you get squished and he barely lets out a 'sorry' before driving off and you know you will get a huge black bruise on your thigh (and it still really hurts!).
And then you get totally confused about where the English Department is because you are standing in Leung Kau Kui when you want to be in Lee Shau Kee (the buildings are next door to each other).
And then you trip down two stairs and get scared and the person at the bottom of the stairs on their phone laughs at you.

This is the map I have to work with.

ATMs

Let's start with the basics. There are apparently 4 ATMs on campus, but I have only been to two. Hang Seng bank has got a branch actually IN campus at the John Fulton Centre (pretty much in Central Campus) and an ATM outside the entrance to the branch, but there are ALWAYS lines. Avoid. Avoid. Avoid! I find this kind of silly because...

The ATM at University Station NEVER has a line.

This ATM is run by Standard Chartered JETCO, and if you have a NAB card, the ATM won't charge you an ATM fee. This is because the JETCO branded ATMs in HK are aligned with Citibank, and Citibank is aligned with NAB. Logically, it follows that Citibank ATMs you won't get charged a withdrawal fee, but I have been charged for using Citibank ATMs in Korea, so who knows really?

For more info see the JETCO link above, and for info on the other ATMs on campus see here.

And remember what I said earlier: cash and Octopus will get you everywhere. Paying by credit card could get you a loud sniff and a look of disgust from the person behind the counter.

And as a foreigner, you already stick out like a sore thumb. Just go with the flow - use cash or OC.

UPDATE

There are two additional ATMs inside the branch of Hang Seng Bank (which is actually located on the 1st floor of the John Fulton Centre, not the ground floor) and a cheque deposit machine... but when I went to the bank to pay my dorm fees today there were long lines at both these ATMs. Just thought I should let it be known that such ATMs exist, in case of emergency or some such incident.

Classes - Week 1 Review

OK, week one classes: COMPLETE!

Once my classes can be finalised (not until next week when the Add/Drop period opens unfortunately) I will post about enrollment drama and HOW TO GET THROUGH ENROLLMENT AT CUHK WITHOUT PERMANENT SCARRING, but for now, I'll just give a run-down of the classes I'll most likely be enrolled in for the duration of the semester.

Linguistics

Language Disorders - Taught by Patrick Wong, this class looks like it will entail a lot of reading and a lot of learning (our textbook "Foundations of Communication: Sciences and Disorders" is nearly 900 pages), but therefore I think it will be extremely rewarding. Patrick has practiced as a neurologist and researcher in the field of Langauge Disorders, with both child and adult patients. From aphasia to cleft-palate to every-part-of-the-throat/tongue-being-cut-out-due-to-cancer-from-smoking, he has seen it all and, in the US, has taught it all. Now he is back in HK, continuing his research into why children with cochlear implants (which these days are near-perfect replacements of the human ear) do not develop normal language functions at the same rate as their hearing peers.

Acquisition of English as an L2 - Taught by Helen Zhao. We spent the first lecture talking about L1 acquisition and establishing some foundations about how a child learns their first language (and historical theories of this process i.e. Skinner and his rats, Chomsky etc). This course is actually offered by the English department, but future students DON'T BE FOOLED! There is a lot of linguistic theory to be learnt, and the course will also focus on research methods as to how L2 is acquired, and to what degree it is acquired in different people (due to motivation, aptitude, anxiety) etc. It will also focus on effective methods of teaching L2, English being the target language of L2, so in the class there are also many students whose major is English Teaching.

Semantics - Taught by Candice Cheung. Semantics will be tough, I can tell. Our first task that lesson was to unpack the semantics of the meaning of the word 'mean(s)'. Like "I know what you mean" as opposed to "smoke means fire" as opposed to "I mean to go to every lesson". Pretty intensive stuff.

Languages

Japanese - New Practical Japanese II. Well, it seems that the grammar is fine, but I have SO much kanji study to do...

Korean II - Oh dear. Oh dear. Some new words. Some new grammar. Now I actually have to start spelling things correctly! >_< But the teacher is brilliant, and he is very patient with our small class of 8 students.

Don't ask about Cantonese or Putonghua. I'll learn from my roommate and my new friends. Sorry brain, no holiday for you until June!

Tennis

Why didn't I think to bring my tennis racquet?!?! CUHK has no less than 12 beautiful tennis courts. Below are the courts I can see from my dormroom window (no zooming! They are really that close!)

Maybe I will go buy a racquet and some tennis shoes while I'm here...

Rowan, what do you think? ^_^

First Impressions

Hello Hong Kong! I like you already.

We were told via the IASP e-newsletter a few weeks ago that we should travel from HK Airport to CUHK by taxi (it would be quite inconvenient to other passengers to travel on the MTX if we had lots of luggage, which is understandable), and that it would be about $300HKD. My taxi driver spoke almost no English, but had a cute figurine in his car.

The green taxis on the right as you exit HK Airport go to the New Territories. Happy point #1: The fare to my actual hostel - like to the door - was less than $220!
Drawback... I arrived right at the start of the lunch hour break for the Morningside College Office >_< (They are closed between 1 and 2pm) so I just had lunch at the cafe in the Tower Block. Pasta, and a not-too-big-not-too-small can of Coke Zero.

Morningside College consists of two buildings: the Student Hostel/Tower Block/High Block (same building, different names), and the Maurice R. Greenberg building (they are only about 10m apart). Downstairs in the Tower Block there is the cafe, which has a lunch special every day (Wednesday is Mediterranean Pasta, which turned out to be carbonara, so I picked out all the bacon) and the lady working in the cafe is really nice. (She actually had  noticed I had picked out the bacon and said I should tell her next time and she would prepare something else. How nice!). The Maurice Building has the Office, Laundry, Dining Hall, and residential apartments.

Actually, that's one thing about HK - people are really nice and helpful (just a little pushy getting on and off the MTR, but that's a mirror of the manners on public transport in lost busy cities in north Asia I think!).

So, we were told to check in to our Hostel first, which I did - at 2pm when they opened again - and I received a key and some info about College rules.

This is my room!

The window is opposite the door, and my bed and desk are on the left when you enter the room.

As you can see, there is one wardrobe for two girls. Hmmmm. 

But the room is really new and clean and we have a beautiful view of the lake (river?), so when study gets too much, I can just look over the University grounds and the water. (The front haze in the photo is the flyscreen)

We had also been told in the e-newsletter that AFTER checking in to the hostel, to go to the I-Centre in Yasumoto International Academic Park. There is a free CUHK app for Android and iPhone which has a really useful map, so I used that to find my way from one place to the other. You have to be pretty on-the-ball to keep up with where to check-in and where to be, because there is no-one to hold your hand, but the whole registration process wasn't difficult - just follow what they tell you in the email. At the I-Centre I registered for my student Octopus card (transport card) and filled in some other paperwork, and bought a bedding set for $200. I then lugged it back to my dorm (uphill), where I met my roommate. She's lovely! Her name is Chloe, she is from Vancouver and she is studying Finance... and she only needs to do three subjects! (I'm very jealous).

Although we had been told in several previous emails that we would have a "local roommate who had expressed interest in sharing with an international student", this is not true as a rule. Some people have local roommates, and some don't. Chloe's family is from China (near Shanghai) so she speaks fluent Mandarin and some Cantonese. Very convenient!

Last night I went out to dinner in Mong Kok with John and two of his friends from highschool (who are staying here in HK with family until the end of January; they study at Flinders University) and two of their friends. Hong Kong by night is amazing. Much older than Seoul, and lots more neon lights. We went down Nathan Road and Soy Street, and we had sushi at Hokkaido Katsu Sushi for dinner (order as much sushi as you like then pay by plate-number/plate-colour at the end) and a kind of iced-gelati for dessert. 

Afterwards John and I caught the train back to the University just before midnight. The train only takes about 20 minutes from the Uni to Mongkok! Excellent!

So, it was a brilliant first day! May there be many more like it ^_^