Days 2 and 3

First, I apologize for my inability to get these up in a timely manner, one which I hope to remedy with this post. Be ware that this will most likely be quite long as I want to catch up on everything past the first day of my arrival, and plenty has happened since then. So, without further adieu, I have much to talk about!

January 18th, 9AM: The first day I was here I arranged to have breakfast with Tommy (my buddy) and then go phone shopping. We had decided to meet at 9AM and so Tommy took me for some local cuisine at one of the on-campus cafeterias. So, we walk in and I prepare myself to try the food I will be eating for the next several months while he orders it for me because let's face it, I can't order local food not only because I can't speak Cantonese, but primarily because I have no idea what I'm ordering. So, we get out food and I try some milk tea to go along with breakfast and I head over to the cash register. The nice lady tells me it will be $15 and I give her a $100 bill thinking to myself, "wow, this is a very expensive breakfast." It takes about another 10 seconds before the thought dawns on me "wait a sec, that's $15 HK." After some quick mental math I realize that it's a little less than two US dollars. I couldn't believe how cheap food is. In the US, a cheap meal is US $5, on average probably between seven and ten dollars, but here in HK a US $3 meal is expensive. So after the shock of absurdly low food prices had set in I actually tried the food. The breakfast was basically some egg, rice, sausage, something akin to a McDonald's breakfast patty, and some squarish thing that looked sort of like opaque Jello. To my surprise, I actually liked most of the food. The sausage, egg, rice, and patties were actually quite good, while the milk tea and squarish Jello thing were not quite to my liking. Overall, however, I thought to myself that I might actually be able to live off this stuff. Actually, the most odd part of breakfast wasn't the breakfast itself, but rather what happened after breakfast. When we were done we stood up and I picked up my tray to take it to the trash when Tommy told me to leave it. I must have given him a puzzled look because he then proceeded to explain that in HK you are supposed to leave your dishes and someone will come by and clean them up because labor is so cheap. I can't tell you how difficult it was for me to walk away from my tray. Every instinct of mine screamed at me to pick up the tray and it took a lot of effort to convince myself to respect local customs and leave it there.

After our little breakfast we went downtown so Tommy could help me get a phone because I knew that I wanted one when I was here to get in touch with people to do things. On a side note, my friend Ghoribet who is also from USC and whom I have been hanging out with still has not gotten a cell phone, and let me say it has been most frustrating being unable to contact her. I honestly am not sure how I used to live without a cell phone and can't imagine doing so ever again in my life. So, we took a bus downtown to Diamond Hill to a place called Hollywood Plaza where he told me are lots of phone shops. So we arrived and wondered around until we found a shop that sells phones. This next part is somewhat hard to describe, but to put it simply I was overwhelmed by the choices available. In the US you pick a network and can then chose from a couple of phones to use, and usually cannot buy a phone from one carrier and use it on another's network. In Asia, the phone and network are completely separate. what this means is that you buy a phone from any number of shops and then can use it on any network, the only thing a network gives you is a SIM card to put in your phone. So we walk into the first shop and there are around 100 phones to choose from. The phones are very different than the ones in the US and most are much more advanced because of the freedom the Asian phone model provides. The other main difference is that in the US your phone is just a tool to make phone calls, in Asia it's also a fashion statement and this means that people pay large sums of money for trendy phones. After checking many stores and spending almost 2 hours looking at phones, I eventually decided on getting a Nokia 6300 for about $200 US, which was one of the cheaper phones. I made sure it's a tri-band phone, which means it can operate with any US carrier, so I'll be able to use it when i get back to the US.

After getting back from phone shopping Tommy and I parted ways and I met up with my friend Ghoribet (who I previously mentioned is also from USC). We had met twice before coming here through the exchange program, and this way we would know someone when we got there. She had arrived the night before and had not yet been downtown so we went downtown where I was able to pass of the appearance of knowledge when in fact I had just been shown all of those things in the previous 24 hours. We ended up going to Ikea and she got an Octopus card (An octopus card is basically an RFID embedded card that you can use to pay for things in stores or primarily to use the public transportation like the MTR or the buses). It was fairly uneventful but still an enjoyable experience. It was nice to feel like I could help someone else get adjusted to this new environment and show them the things I had picked up on in my brief time in the city so far. I should mention before i go any further that in terms of food my track record had not been so good. My first meal here was pizza hut, then was local food for breakfast, but for lunch before we went downtown I will admit to having McDonald's for time reasons (or at least that's my flimsy excuse). For dinner Ghoribet and I both tried more local cuisine in one of the cafeterias on campus and I had a dish called Beef Fried Rice Noodles, which is one of the best Chinese dishes I have ever had in my life!

Then we parted ways and I came back to my room. about one minute after I got back I heard a key in the door and my roommate came in. On the housing application I had requested a local student for a roommate and was excited to see who I would be living with for the next half year. You can imagine my surprise when a guy from Texas steps through the door. We get along fine and he's actually a Chemistry guy from Georgia Tech. Oh, and his name is Matt.



January 19th, 8AM: still being slightly jetlagged I woke up early (the fact that my roommate was also jetlagged also contributed) and got onto my computer. Upon getting on I spoke to several friends back at USC who were all gathering to play Starcraft together and invited me to join them. During this however, we also had a bit of a housing crisis because the building we plan to live in next year decided to increase the rent by $500/month for our apartment. So, it basically came down to destroying my beautifully crafted plan and required us to change our arrangements. Without going into details, we were forced to find a 7th roommate to keep rent down. The crisis took about 3 hours to resolve and then we finally got around to Starcraft. I will freely admit here that I got a bit homesick at this point. My five roommates next year were all sitting together having fun without me and I was stranded here half a world away from them and I admit that I was slightly angry at myself for coming to HK because I missed my friends. I suppose one of my greatest fears about going abroad for a semester was the fact that people can change and I was going to be missing out on 9 months of their lives and unable to take part in the adventures they will have. So, that lasted for about an hour and that's the only homesickness/regret I've experienced during my time here. We ended up having a very good game of starcraft, which I discovered how much zerg can be a pain in the side of anyone on island maps by building bases everywhere and for so cheap.

In the afternoon I went downtown with a bunch of international students and we ended up going around (including to Ikea for the 3rd time) and then up to The Peak. This is the highest point on HK island where you can see the entire city at night. Here's the amazing view we were treated to:

It turns out our amazing view was actually limited to about 3 meters in a direction due to heavy, heavy fog. The area on top of the mountain was quite nice though and even had a shopping mall on top. On our way back down I ended up getting somewhat car sick because it's a very windy road and I was talking to the guy next to me the whole time instead of looking out the window. Once we got down the mountain everyone headed over to LKF (basically the place where all the foreigners go at night for parties, bars, and clubs) but I opted to go back to campus alone because I was feeling pretty sick after the bus trip.

Sadly, I will not accomplish my goal of finishing everything tonight because I know my entry on my 4th day here will be quite long and I would like to get sleep tonight. As a preivew, you get to hear about me eating Dim Sum, going to Ikea again, seeing Victoria harbor, blowing things up, going to a bar, and meeting people from Singapore (who are the most amazing people I've met here), although not necessarily in that order.

Day 1 (part 2)

So we finally arrive at the university in our taxi and get dropped off literally at the front door of my dorm and proceed to check in. One of the first odd things I noticed (aside from them driving on the left side of the road) was that I'm living on the 1st floor, but I'm not on the ground. Apparently here the floors are numbered Ground, then 1, 2, 3... So, I arrive at my room and I must say I was surprised. This university isn't very old and was built in the last 15 years or so, and as a result I pictured myself in a nice dorm room similar to a room in Parkside or equivalent accommodations. My dorm actually looks more like North or Pardee Tower instead, being somewhat spartan. The first thing i noticed was the bed. When I think of an unpadded bed I think of a bed that might be 8-12 inches thick. Well, my bed here is a grand total of 2-3 inches.

So, my buddy then took me around campus and showed me where everything is. We then went to the business office to check in and met two other international students from Canada (although one was actually from France) and they invited me to go with them downtown that afternoon. My buddy (his name is Tommy if i hadn't mentioned that yet) had something he had to do that afternoon so it worked out.

I forgot to mention earlier that another thing that I was pleasantly surprised at is how well developed the public transportation is in HK. I can get essentially anywhere just by public transportation for very cheap and it's also very fast. So to get to downtown I just have to take a minibus to the MTR station, which is basically the city subway network (again I cannot express how amazingly well the public transportation here works) and then tried to find a few stores to go shopping at. So, we get off at one of the stops we think is correct and discover that we have no idea where we are. So it's me, a Canadian guy, a French guy, and a Swede. At this point i decided that we're going to look like tourists no matter what we do so i might as well get out my camera and start taking pictures like a tourist. Basically we just walked around at various places downtown before getting lunch at a pizza hut and then finding an Ikea. Yes, Pizzahut and Ikea. See me be international. I feel compelled to explain this further now that I sound like an idiot. We went to Pizzahut because the Canadian guy wanted to and we had to go to Ikea for bedsheets and pillows and such things because it was so much cheaper than the other places. Below are some of the pictures of places we saw. So we wondered around and ended up getting lost trying to find the minibus to get back to UST (the college I'm at) and overall it was a fun experience. My favorite part was the architecture of the city and how beautiful the buildings were. So, I got back and after the relative lack of sleep on the plane the previous night, coupled with the time difference here meant I was tired. So I came back and unpacked before going to sleep. Although, when i checked in they neglected to mention that the door has a key code to get into the building. So to get in I had to stand outside for half an hour and wait for someone to go in.


So, I got back and slept. Not very well, due to the screaming students running up and down the hall until 5AM, but I did manage to get some sleep.

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.

The Plane

12:05AM January 16th: The 747 finally departs the airport, complete with the obligatory screaming child 2 rows away. You can imagine how happy i was.

It began with the obligatory saying goodbye to parents for several minutes, and the continuous waving as i proceeded through the security checkpoint. I slowly made my way to the gate, in no hurry to sit down for two hours before the plane left. After two hours of uninteresting nothingness boarding finally begins. I get settled on the plane with ease, finding an easy spot to store my luggage before sitting for what i know will be a very long trip. I started off reading a Popular Mechanics and quickly finished before dinner was served. After dinner, which I would like to add is somewhat difficult to eat with the short space between my seat and the one in front of me, I began to experiment with the multimedia system on the plane. This was probably the most interesting part of my trip. each seat had its own TV built into the seat behind it, so i was able to choose from around 90 movies playing at any given time. About this time they turned the lights on the plane off to allow people to sleep and so I began by watching the last part of Rush Hour and channel surfing. At about 5 AM West Coast time I decided i should get some sleep, for the reason that my intent was to stay up late that day and get sleep on the plane to orient myself to the proper time in Hong Kong. It didn't work. Remember that comment earlier about the obligatory screaming baby? Well, everytime i managed to finaly get to sleep one of several factors conspired against me. First, the plane seats are less than comfortable and the cramped leg room was a significant obstacle to comfort. Second, there was the screaming baby which screamed through most of the flight. Third, the man behind me got up every few minutes and proceeded to shake my seat each time. Fourth, the same man also, for a reason unknown to me, found it necessary to turn his seat light on for several minutes before and after he got up. Now, the term "seat light" would imply to most that the light only shines on said person's seat. This is not the case. It illuminated the better part of his entire row as well as my row in front of him.

Please allow me to say that it is not my intent here to sound as though I am complaining, as that is not my goal. In fact, i found the whole situation to be rather humorous at how many stereotypical events occurred to me on that flight. I tried several remedies to prevent the aforementioned problems including ear plugs as well as one of those eye patches to block out light. If you have ever heard how loudly babies scream on planes, you will most likely understand when I tell you the ear plugs did not work. To make matters worse, both of the passengers next to me slept quite soundly for most of the flight, precluding the chance for me to get up and walk around.

I also found that I had the peculiar ability to catch movies about 20-30 minutes before they ended. On the plane, a single channel would have a single movie that would repeat itself when it finished. In between times when i tried to sleep I watched movies and I was able to see the last 10 minutes of The Matrix a total of three times. I think I ended up watching Rush Hour again, as well as The Matrix, The Terminator, and also a Chinese movie which was very good.

In the end, I managed to get a grand total of about 2 hours of sleep. The entire plane flight was in pitch black, because we left during the night and arrived at 7AM, so I was unable to even look out an enjoy the scenery. Oh, and I forgot to mention that if you ever travel on a plane flight as long as this, don't bring a backpack and put it under the seat in front of you. Trust me, it quickyl takes up what little leg room you have. Still, it was a good experience and I was filled with eager anticipation of what would await me in Hong Kong when i arrived. We touched down shortly before 7AM local time and my 14 hour plane flight of fun was finally over.