Happy New Year 2009

25th January

The first two weeks of Uni were over and Lunar New Year break started!!!! I sorted out most of my classes and I was ready for vacation, again, although I have to say, I feel like I have been on vacation for a long long long time...since I easily lost track of time here. The weather was pretty good up until today. The temperature crashed down to 8°C and it was supposed to stay cold the whole week.

The last two weeks:

In the past two weeks, I went out every single night. There is Lady's night in Wan Chai, Hong Kong Island on Wednsday. We went to Swindlers, an Irish bar basically, where we, lady's, would be able to drink all kinds of mixed drinks all night long basically. Thursday nights, it's the same in Lan Kwai Fong. Wan Chai is more or less the hookers district. I never feel comfortable there, but if you are with a group of people and in the bars and clubs, you have a great time and feel nothing of the red lights. Lan Kwai Fong, we call it LKF, is the party district. They have around 5 streets of bars and clubs on the 20th floor or underground and restaurants. Pretty amazing. However, I have not found my favorite club or bar. The music is mixed. A lot of Hip Hop, mostly Hip Hop, but yet, one night, we went to more upscale clubs and found the awaited House and Electro music. Loved it!!! The best club, I would say so far is MINT, where little sharks swim in a huge aquarium which is located along the walls. My favorite bar is: LE JARDIN, in which you feel hidden but you have the vibe of beeing in a garden(as the name implies). Love it there!!!

Of course we watched OBAMAS INAUGGURATION CEREMONY. It was amazing. I spend the night in a bar, which was crowded with Americans and it felt very good to be around them during a moment of history. Howard, a black American from Tennessee, cried and cheered. He was so emotional and he even landed in the newspaper the next day because of his emotions.

Some people were praying and others were hoping Obama would not get shot. GO OBAMA!

Then the party went on.

Another day, Mike, threw a party at his apartment. The first apartment on Hong Kong island I've entered at that time, as most of the people I have met so far live in student halls or with their families in the New Territories. It was big compared to how small they seem from the outside. 14th floor in one of those apscapers.

Another night, couple of girls and guys and me, just went dancing in the streets at 3 a.m. in LKF. There was music coming out of every club and bar and people joint us and suddenly 30 people were dancing in the street. Dancing to some western 80's music.

All the nights out, all the drink in and all the other things that come with it, were so far pretty amazing! I love it here. Hong Kong is great. You spend your days and nights with people from all over the world, people from at least 10 different nations every night. We talk English, we talk French, we talk Spanish, we talk Putonghua, we talk German. They talk Cantonese, Thai, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Dutch, Finlandisch, Swedish, African(Kenya dialect and other), Danish, Hungarian, Polish, Italian, Russian....and come from the Australian, Asian, American, African and European continent.

Cantonese is national language here and it is completely different from the Chinese I know :-)


LUNAR NEW YEAR:

The new year after the moon years. The next week I will be staying with my roomate, You Jung Lee (Korean, grew up in Bangkok) in her friend's apartment right in the centre of Causeway Bay. The apartment was quite big, with a kitchen, two bedrooms with big beds and nice matrasses (my back said WUHHEEEE) and a livingroom with a huge sofa and table. It was unlike many chinese apartments.


The first weekend, our University planned a New Years Cruise on a boat going back and forth, from where we could enjoy the light show of Hong Kong night skyline, which is going on every single night. We had a 11 courses menue, which was mostly fresh seafood and pretty good.
There were many celebration events going on throughout the week.

(Hong Kong night skyline from the boat)

After that, we stopped by at the flower market. Unfortunately I did not take too many pictures, it was pretty tough to take them as there were too many people walking at a pace of a snake, as you couldn't go faster. Flower market....you expect flowers!!! Well, they even sold Iphones ballons as big a 5 meter, huge icecream hats anything and everything that we call "KITSCH" in german. Very Asian aswell.

On Monday, we saw the New Years parade, which was rather boring because it was more advertising than parade.
Tuesday, we saw the huge fire work from the two IFC tower. It lasted 30 minutes, however halfway through the smoke from the fireworks(never seen fireworks that smoky in my life before!!!!), we could barely see the fireworks, however I still enjoyed the noise!



(two IFC, from the garden terasse of IFC mall-->)

We ended up in SOHO, South Hollywood, Hong Kong Island, that night where the longest escalator in the world under a roof runs. It is a lie though, because it is not so much continues, however it is very very long. It runs down from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. in the morning, so people who live on the top in the many many apartments could come down to go to work in the morning and after that it runs up throughout the day until the morning 8 a.m. Of course, all escalators are faster here in Hong Kong, as people move fast to get to their destination as fast as they can. No stops preferred.

SOHO, has many great restaurants with all kinds of food and of course there are many bars there aswell.

We celebrated all night long. HAPPY NEW YEAR 2009!!! (again)

Sunday 11th - Wednesday 14th

Sunday 11th

I went on a ferry to go to Discovery Bay, Lantau Island, to meet up with family friends who live there and have lunch at their place. The ferry ride was pretty interesting, since I could be in between many many boats and ships of all kinds. (Hong Kong is one of the harbours with the most ships crossing in one year in the world) I figured before, the ships would let out a lot of smoke and contribute to the pollution, well they really do not know the filter technique here...that's for sure.

Martin picked me up at the harbor with his golf cart and we went back to the apartment. They have three girls and one absolutely cute dog named "Chocolate". They also had friends over, a family, Chinese mom from the Chan family and Australian dad and a daugther. All the kids were wayyy younger. But we had german Bratwürste and it was very nice. I got told that my Mandarin/Putonghua ain't that great...but that woman critizied anything and everything anyways and by now other people told me it's not that bad.

Discovery Bay is a small Utopia, I have to say, it can only be reached by boat or through a tunnel, but there were no cars allowed and it was cleaner and more structured than anything I have ever seen before. The view from the apartment was amazing. I saw all the houseboat yachts. Pretty amazing to live there.








Monday 12th

First day of University. I had to sign in and get my classes sorted out. It took me about an hour to find my department. The Meng Wah Complex.
I took a minibus from my residence down to east gate, which took about 5 minutes, with two others from here. They were not in my department though. Soon after I buddied up with two other girls to find our way up. Yes, UP. It's a pretty intense hike, but at least I work out before even getting to class everyday. It takes about 5 staircases with 20 steps each, to get to the first elevator to go up from ground level to L1. Then you turn right and get to the big place which oversees all of Hong Kong harbor with some skyscapers blocking the view in between, of course.
The library, starbucks and benches are situated there. It's huge. Then you walk up a staircase with around 100 steps to get to a park with a pond and its beautiful. You turn left and get to a building with 5 moving staircases. Then you turn right. The Meng Wah is right there with another rolling staircase going up. And the elevator up to the 7th floor. WOW, compared to the Munich Business School building, that is what I call a great campus and a great university!!!!

I ended up getting all of my classes and still had two weeks for add 'n drop period to change them. I wasn't sure about my Putonghua class, but that should soon be getting sorted out. I had already missed my first class that day...therefore I simply looked around, got other things sorted out and went to lunch with some new aquaintances. There are two cafeterias, one sandwich place, a bank, a supermarket and small other stores like a bookstore and an apple store on campus. Pretty cool. I would end up having no class on Friday's and only one hour on Wednsday. My schedule turned out to be great!!!! Thuesday and Thursday were my business days, morning classes :-( which should be fine... Monday and Wednesday my film and chinese days!

Wednesday 14th

In Mong Kok, Kowloon Side. We went to eat Thai Food on the 14th floor of a building (view down to the street, there are wayy more people at night)
and shopping afterwards at one of the biggest malls.
You get around on buses and with the MTR here or the tram or taxi and people just love queuing up, they wait and are patient, they don't mind at all. At times there are around 30 people standing nicely lined up to get on a bus that only fits 15 and comes every 20 minutes. There are big double deckers, which are a heritage of the British here and minibusses with brakes that sound like they wouldn't work anymore, however, you know that you get whereever you want to, whenever, pretty fast, even if the bus driver goes down a huge sloped hill with 80 km/h or makes a sharp turn with 60 km/h...and oh yeah, the road system is like in England, left side driving. I just noticed that a couple of days later, when I tried crossing a street and nearly got run over :-)

That same day, my wallet, with EVERYTHING, stupid me of course took all my credit cards and everything with me, the emergency credit cards aswell....yup...my wallet got "lost"/"stolen" however you want to put it. We went back to the mall and talked to the security guy while walking backwards the way we took. The security, obviously did not have much to do and he patiently took me everywhere. A lost and found in that mall, of course, did not exist, that says all. I would not see it ever again. Fortunately I kept 500 HK $ at home, which is around 50€ and would have to last for a little while.






(people queuing up)

Mong Kok: I was glad to be human!

Saturday 11th:

I meet a couple of girls from my floor, they all seemed pretty nice. Not that I remember the names anymore, but that was to come later on.

Later on that day, I meet up with Silke in Mong Kong, Kowloon side and we went to the lady's market, the food market and other parts. It was nice seeing someone rather familiar and blonde.

To be travelling alone on the MTR(metro) and experiencing Hong Kong on my own, was something very impressive. I looked at the people around, they seemed to be very different, different ethnicity and cultural background but yet they fit together in some strange and unexplicable way.

We went wandering around in Mong Kok. We saw the Ladies Market, where I, for the first time noticed all the "original fakes". Bargaining would become a hobby for me later on. However, up until today, I never dared to buy a fake. I was quite busy taking pictures.
We went to go eat at a small place, Chinese kitchen. I had noodels in soup with beef.

After that, our tour continued and we ended up at the food market. I again was busy taking pictures. What impressed me the most, were the fresh looking, huge apples in red or yellow. Huge in this would mean a diameter of 20 cm. All the other fruits and vegetabels were quite big and rich as well. There was a bunch of meat stands presententing pig's faces and legs and dried chicken turned inside out, or just baby chicken with yellow skin in plastic bags. (the chicken here still had their heads and feet on and you would even eat all of it). I even saw a whole pigs head hanging from a wire......
We passed a stand with chicken in a cage. They all looked fat and healthy and the butcher took one out after the other, played with the wings not in a quite friendly way. Then, put it back in the cage with its fellow mates and chose another as if he was presenting his products. One of the ladies crowded up in front of the stand acting as if they were trying to choose the best-suited chicken, was buying one. Of course not alive. So the butcher took a big, fat, brown chicken out and as we could tell from the cry and ear-breaking chicken scream, it knew its fate. At one point, as the butcher was laughing and laughing in a scary manner while looking at us, that chicken-cry turned silent. I couldn't look, but it was already too late when I turned around with my hand holding myself back from screaming out loud. I was glad to be human.

Arrival in Hong Kong

When I opened my eyes after a lousy nap of three hours and two movies, I looked out of the window and saw a bunch of small islands everywhere. The sun was shining and there was not one single cloud in the sky. My tiredness faded away and I was just so excited.

Soon after I landed on Hong Kong, Lantau Island, where the rollfield is about 10 meters away from the water. I got my luggage and made my way to the exit to catch the 25 minutes Airport Express to Hong Kong Island. After having troubles with my heavy luggage, the train ticket and the ATM machine....I finally sat on the train and the new unfamiliar landscape, tropical forrests, smaller and bigger hills/mountains, small islands everywhere with the ocean and boats in between. We crossed the ocean through a tunnel from Lantau Island to Hong Kong, Kowloon side and again from Kowloon to Hong Kong Island, the island I was going to live on!!! The first thing I saw in the city, Kowloon side, was sky scapers, apartment buildings that did not seem to end, clustered together in all different colors. Modern ones and old, shabby ones that seem to collapse every other second. And the Airport Express was going so fast.

After I got of the train I met my buddy, Jenny Cheung, who stood there with a sign saying my name. As always, Trisha, was wayy too late and overestimated the efficiency of public services.
Together, we took a taxi to the west of the island, to Pok Fu Lam and my student residence. Since I was one of the last girls to arrive, I did not get the expected by view room, however it turned out there was only 3 rooms where you could see the ocean. The other 147 where either looking up to the hill and the Queen Mary hospital or into another apartment skyscaper("apscaper") I put down all my luggage, my roomade seem to be from Thailand, she wasn't here yet. I had a desk, a bed, a closet and it all looked pretty clean. The matresse however was soooo hard, I couldn't believe it, but I mean, aren't hard matresses good for you??? We left the place soon after and made our way to Causeway Bay, to buy a prepaid card and other things I needed. It was almost 7 p.m.

Causeway Bay, the New York of Hong Kong with Timesquare and Timesquare Plaza, was a place that did not seem real. Either my tiredness kicked in or it was really what it is. Thousands of people making their way through the streets on the street and the sidewalk, with cars passing through quite slowly or not at all. Different lights and signs everywhere and tiny tiny stores. I looked at the prices, how cheap is this????!!!

After I bought all the necessary things, we went to go eat at a Chinese fastfood restaurant:
Cafe de Coral.(notice the name sounds french) First food in Hong Kong, fastfood, was good enough. Bony chicken with rice and yummy yummy vegetables.

That same night I was supposed to go to the first International Exchange Student party at 10 p.m., however we did not come back until 11.30 p.m. and I did not want to be rude, therefore I didn't rush, we went back to my place and yeah, I was sooo glad my buddy was with me the whole time, therefore things were easier to sort out and she told me a lot about what, where, why......

I realized she had to go on a 1.5 hour busride back to the New Territories, to go home and I walked her down to the door. Because of gratefulness, exhaustion and all the other emotions kicking in...I hugged her, which seem weird for her since they, the people here, rather wave goodbye, which I found out later...