Day 1: The Adventure Begins

7AM January 17th: The plane lands in Hong Kong. As I slowly made my way through the maze of corridors trying to find the baggage claim, the first thing i noticed was the fact that everyone at the airport was Asian. I was certainly not in Kansas anymore. I was actually on another continent and will spend the next 4.5 months of my life in this unfamiliar place. It was an interesting sensation (although it was probably helped by the lack of quality sleep on the plane) that I'm not sure how to describe, I guess the best way to put it would be a sense of adventure; almost like I was exploring an exotic jungle where no man had gone before.

My first impression was that it was quite foggy, which in itself is not very interesting, so please keep in mind that I would not have mentioned it unless it were interesting and as such I will get back to it in a couple paragraphs. Now, here i am walking through this huge airport trying to find the baggage claim to retrieve my luggage. I managed to take several wrong turns in unmarked areas, but finally found the automatic shuttle to take us back and forth from the main buildings. It turns out this is very similar, if not identical, to the metro system they use in the city, but I'll give you my impressions on that later. So, after checking each and every single baggage area for my flight (it was naturally the very last carousel I looked at) I walked around trying to figure out where to go next.

Picture this: I see two gates for me to walk through with my two giant pieces of luggage, a smaller piece, and my backpack to top it all off and I see one of them is for people with things to declare (the example they gave on the sign was too much alcohol) and the other is for people with nothing to declare. So I look at everyone just walking through the gate for nothing to declare so I decide it must be where i'm supposed to go as well. Now, my guess is that the nice people standing at that gate have seen me walking around and trying to figure this all out, so naturally when I walk through one of the nice ladies says hello to me and I say hello back to her. They then proceed to ask me to step aside. Remember my enthusiasm about the screaming baby? I was even more enthusiastic about this (sadly, the sarcasm is not adequately conveyed by the text). So, you can imagine what's racing through my mind at this point: what have I done wrong? Am i really just that lucky that I'm the only person they ask to step aside out of the tens of people i watched walk through? Did they see me walking around and think i'm nervous and trying to hide something? What's going to happen now? Well, it turns out not very much happened. All i had to do was put my luggage through another x-ray machine. Yeah, sort of anti cilimatic.

After they took a look at my luggage they sent me on my way to immigration. There i just had to fill out a small piece of paper and they looked at my passport and stamped it several times and I was done. That was it, not too bad at all (except for that moment of terror when they asked me to step aside).

Now, before i continue I must explain what they do for the exchange students. They have a program where they assign each exchange student a "buddy" to help us get adjusted and figure things out. Let me say that this is one of the best ideas anyone has ever had, I mean, it's up there with air conditioning! I'm sure this will be a shock to you, but now I'm going to tell you that my buddy offered to meet me at the airport. Big surprise. So, we had emailed each other and he said he would meet me at the exit and would be wearing an orange jacket so I told him I'd be in my trusty cardinal USC sweatshirt. I'm walking out of the immigration area and looking for my buddy in an orange jacket when a guy randomly yells out "Ansel?" at me. You see, it was my buddy (another big surprise). When he said "orange jacket," I pictured a bright orange, not the dull orange it was. So anyways, now that you've been sufficiently bored reading my journey through the airport and dreading reading the next several hours of my life, I will say right now that I will attempt to be more brief (although I'll probably fail at this).

Alright, so my buddy suggests that we take a bus into downtown instead of a taxi the whole way because it's cheaper. I consider how much I know about transportation in Hong Kong and quickly decide to do whatever he tells me. So we got on a double-decker bus (all the buses here are double-deckers) and piled my luggage into the luggage racks and sat down. I assumed that Hong Kong was just one large city and that we wouldn't be that long of a drive, but it ended up taking about an hour and a half to get to downtown. You see, the airport is on a very large island that is not connected to the main part on Hong Kong, so we had to drive a ways to get there. during this time i just stared out the window looking at what everything was like and talking to my buddy asking him questions about HK in general (from here on out i will usually use HK for Hong Kong because let's face it, it's a lot easier for me to write and I'm lazy at heart). We finally arrived at a place my buddy told me we should get off at and take a taxi from there.

So, we get off the bus and guess what, there aren't any taxi stops near us. So we started to walk trying to find taxis we can take. Well, we ended up walking for about 15 minutes before we just stopped and waited to flag down a taxi. During this time I felt like the stereotypical stupid American who is lugging around giant over sized pieces of luggage. Let me tell you, that was one of the only things I had thought about before i came here: I DO NOT want to be a stupid American. In fact, during my interview to go abroad, when i was asked why they should choose me over all the other applicants I responded by saying that I am a person who is not going to fill the stereotype American because I always stay well versed on world politics and try to be knowledgeable about other countries. I actually think that my comments about that helped me to score so highly on the interview portion to get my first choice program. Also, growing up in Cupertino/San Jose has given me an international outlook on life that I am grateful for having.

Where was I? oh yes, so we finally get a taxi and it drives us to the university. Before I say anything else about the rest of my day and show you pictures, let me first give you my impressions of HK. First off, it's very clean. I mean, there isn't trash on streets, most places are very well kept and look like the nicest buildings in the US and is in general just very clean. Second, the building are so tall! Pretty much all the buildings are around 40-50 stories and they are almost all apartments. Even now, six days after I arrives I'm still amazed at how tall the buildings are. Third, although the buildings are very tall, there are lots and lots of trees. I feel like i'm inbetween a city and a jungle in the city because the building are huge yet so much of the city is forest. This leads nicely into the fourth observation of mine, that it is very hilly. I always assumed it would be flat but everywhere you look are mountains and hills, which contribute to the tall buildings (few areas to build) and also the trees (once again because you can't build on the buildings. Oh, i almost forgot, remember my comment about how foggy the city was? Well, I asked my buddy when the fog usually clears and he gave me a puzzled look and asked me "what fog?" Yeah, in case you hadn't figured it out, that's how bad the air pollution is here, i thought it was fog. So, for those of you who have or have had the pleasure of living in Los Angeles, trust me, it's much worse here and if i complain about air pollution of LA again, please slap me across the face.

I think those were my biggest first impressions on my way to the university, in addition to the size of the city being bigger than i thought. Well, i've failed in my goal of finishing all the blogs up to present time before i go to sleep for tonight, so I will continue my adventure stories tomorrow morning (my morning that is).

Also, for those of you who have bothered to read all the way to the bottom here, I thank you for taking such an interest in my life and my experiences. I promise that I have some good stories to share in my next post as well as some interesting insights. Oh, and the time difference is 16 hours ahead of the West Coast. So take your current time there, subtract 8 hours, then make it tomorrow and that's what time it is for me. I will continue to be on AIM, MSN, Skype, as well as facebook and email, so feel free to ask me anything. Thanks for reading and I'll give you those interesting stories in a couple more hours. Look forward to it as a bedtime story.