February 16th: Climbing random rocks!!!

Day 31, 3PM: So, today I decided to be adventurous. My friend Brian who I met at the Uni Bar the other night at the student gathering and I both mentioned that we had wanted to go and explore the beach around HKUST, so we decided to go after class. We began by going down to what I call “Three Meter Beach” because it only looks like it’s three meters long (it’s really closer to 10) and then proceeded to climb on rocks and see how far we could get. After about half an hour of fun we reached an impassable chasm and had to run around. To be honest, it was slightly disappointing.

However, a little thing like an impassible chasm is not enough to stop us from having our fun so we decided to go the other direction along the beach. From campus you can see a decently long beach about half a mile from campus and we decided to make our new goal to reach that beach. Much to our dismay, we got stuck on the first rock we came to. Yup, the first rock. The rock is huge and juts out into the water, so the only way to get past it is to climb over it using a very sketchy rope that’s tied to something on top or to wait for low tide and climb around it. We decided that the rope was not to be trusted (nor did we know if there was another rope on the other side) and that we had to abandon our little trip.

Right as we were about to end our expedition, we decided to go and take a look at a trail Brian noticed near the Mini Bus stop so we went up there to see what was in store for us. What we found was a path that went either up or down, so we decided the down option was better. So we start walking down, and down, and down, and down some more. Then we walked down a bit further just for fun. At this point we’ve been going down steps for several minutes and have no clue where we are or where we’re going – I was excited! At one point we could see a giant waterfall off in the distance and decided our second adventure would be to try and find the top/base of it, but that’s another story. So it turns out, this path took us all the way down the mountain HKUST is built on the side of (probably around 40 stories down from the where we started) and emptied us right onto the beach we were trying to get to. So, we wondered around there and climbed on more random rocks until we decided it was getting late and we should head back.

To see the adventure, follow this link and it will take you to a photo album of our expedition, because the fun wasn’t over yet.

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2227564&l=7b05c&id=3423216

After our little adventure, we met up with the group for lunch (Emily, Tyler, William, Stephen, Alex, Brian, and Me) and then went to a really cool Olympic thing in downtown. Basically it was an exhibit on the history of the Olympics and all about the ones in Beijing this summer. The funniest thing that happened was that at the end there was a stage and people singing and not only were they all wearing US ARMY sweatshirts, they were singing this song “We are ready” over and over again, because that was the only line in English.... and if you hear it it gets stuck in your head, not to mention it was just plain funny.

A model of The Bird's Nest

I think this one is called the Water Cube

Everyone's favorite Olympic mascots

The Olympic torch

Various historic artifacts, at this point my camera started to run low on batteries

These are the singers singing "We are ready" in the ARMY sweatshirts

A picture of downtown on our way back to the MTR

Your favorite blogger with the Olympic sign

So after the Olympic thing, we went to LKF to see a comedy club one of their friends was performing at. Apparently this was the only comedy club in all of Hong Kong because it isn’t a popular form of entertainment here. They have two shows, one in Cantonese and one in English, and so we went to the English one (after getting some halfway decent Mexican food, and I REALLY, REALLY miss my Chipotle…). The show itself was decent, and we all went for drinks afterwards where I got my usual coke. All in all, a good Saturday.