January 30th: Time to get Oriented

Day 14, 9AM: Day 14, 9AM: I admit I had been somewhat apprehentous of this moment for several days not because of what was going to happen, but because of what it symbolize: today was the end of my freedom. I have been in Hong Kong for two weeks now getting acclimated to life and I have been having a blast. Today was the orientation day for exchange students where they explained things about the campus and our individual programs. The first half was pretty boring stuff where department heads from places like public safety came and gave speeches. After that was over, we split into the various departments such as Business or Science for a more tailored orientation explaining the various specifics about registration and courses. One of the nice things about being a business major (this is just one out of many, many advantages) is that companies like to donate things that they give out for free. We were able to get a free briefcase, a nice polo shirt, and other such things. After that was done we all went to a welcome lunch buffet that is free for all international students. I found an empty seat next to my Singaporean friends and have a pleasant conversation with the head of the chemistry department.

After that I decided it was time to head back to my room and did various nondescript things when I remembered that I never actually bought The Orange Box. For those of you who do not know what this is, it’s a program from a company called Steam where you can download games directly to your computer and bypass the need for CDs. So I signed up for an account, put in my credit card info, and clicked purchase. It’s supposed to be simple, right? Yes, you’re correct, it is supposed to be simple. Unfortunately, simple is not the same as ‘works.’ So, before I left I called my credit companies to tell them I will be in HK until the end of May. When you purchase a game through Steam the transaction goes through their offices in California, meaning that it comes up as a credit card purchase in the USA. As such, my credit cards were denied. Honestly, I was a bit annoyed. Ok, I was more than a bit annoyed. So, I waited until my parents woke up and asked them to log on as me and use their credit cards to buy it for me. This part worked well and I set it up to download so I could play Portal (my favorite game) in the morning.

This is also supposed to be easy. Sadly, it began downloading at about 2 KBps. For those of you who are not tech geeks like myself, this means that my 4 gigabyte download will take weeks. So much for the super fast college internet connection. Anyways, I decided not to go to a soccer match or a poker game with a bunch of international students and instead opted to watch the new episode of House and catch up on some blogging instead.

My surprise of the evening came when Mr. Prow said hello on my Yahoo account. Mr. Prow is a good family friend who we know from our church and also was my boss last summer for my internship. We had a pleasant chat and it was nice to have someone new decide to say hello.



Yes, Starbucks is everywhere.