Georgia's Exchange City University | Hong Kong
To call exchange a life changing experience seems cliché but it’s not a lie. Returning, you feel like a square block with rounded corners, still trying to fit into the square hole, but no one else notices the difference. You want to talk about what happened all the time. You talk about it all the time. A year later, you still talk about it all the time. Everyone rolls their eyes when you start off another story with “well, when I was in Hong Kong…” but here we go.
I went for a semester to City University in Hong Kong. CityU is not on Hong Kong Island, but the Kowloon side in Kowloon Tong. Kowloon Tong is one of the last neighbourhoods before the New Territories, which is where the densely packed hustle and bustle of Kowloon side spreads out into the mountains, the most authentic food and the occasional house.
Be warned, there are also monkeys in the new territories. One stole my ice cream. When I say stole, I mean it jumped from a tree onto my back and made a swipe for it with its furry little paw, scratching my wrist on the way. I managed to shake the thing off, and we faced each other, eye to eye. It bared its teeth and snarled. I lobbed the ice cream at its head and made my escape. My local friends who I was hiking with were crying with laughter. Typical gui-lo behaviour. They had warned me, I didn’t listen. Don’t be like me.
I had another monkey encounter, at the 10 000 Buddha’s temple in Sha Tin. Not to be confused with the Big Buddha on Lantau; although both have a lot of steps, one has one very large Buddha and one has very many small Buddhas. Helen from the Global Office at CityU kindly took a bunch of us exchange students on a tour of the latter, and on our way down we stopped at a bee farm, braved the monkeys (luckily this time, unscathed) and had lunch in a chaa chuan tang, which is a traditional Cantonese restaurant that often does lunch sets.
We were treated to Hong Kong style French toast (with peanut butter and condensed milk, get your tastebuds around some of that) and dong leng cha, which is lemon iced tea. After long periods of disuse, this is one of the only phrases remaining in my Cantonese vocabulary. Probably because during the summer, I poured it down my throat by the bucket load at every meal; in 85% humidity, hydration and sugar are key! I also remember numbers, learnt from the announcements of my lift at each floor. That, and the swear words. Essential.
While I was studying at CityU I stayed in the residence halls. My roommate and I were quite different people, but her being from Auckland we were bought together by our shared cultural values in a mix of everything new. I’d been to Hong Kong and also Mainland China (as they call in HK) before so I felt like I had some handle on the culture and knew what to expect. This was true although it was the little things that often were the most surprising, like the way people wash their bowls and chopsticks with hot water at restaurants; the fact that coffee shops don’t open until the afternoon; being shouted at when you spoke Mandarin to Cantonese speakers. Can of worms, that.
But what I wasn’t expecting was the cultural differences I found between myself and the other exchange students. CityU had 600 exchange students while I was there, and we spent a lot of time with each other, mostly in the same boat without anyone we knew. I was in culture shock with how much my UK friends dressed up to go out, how what my American friends did I thought was rude but they thought it was polite, and how my French friends complained about the food. It took just as much adjustment in such a mixed group of friends to each other’s ways, as it did to the ways of the local culture.
I had really expected it would be easy to make local friends, but it was hard! Partially because there were so many of us on exchange, but people tended to keep to themselves. However, I decided that was ridiculous and I set out on a mission. My first two local friends I made I met on the street outside of a club! One of them went to CityU and we spent the night partying and we’re still friends today. Once I’d made my first local friend, it became easier – these girls invited me along when they went hiking (yes, see the monkey ordeal earlier) and I got to meet more and more people. When I went back to HK a few months after exchange (couldn’t stay away), my friends put me up, and one of them is coming on Exchange to Australia in 2018.
Part of why I chose HK was because I wanted to immerse myself in another culture. While there’s a heavy western influence there, especially on the island side, living in Kowloon definitely pushed me outside of my comfort zone. HK is like different worlds alongside one another that don’t quite seem to blend: the financial hub, the banker-expat lifestyle, the money and materialism of the rich and the little local ways of life. Becoming close with my local friends, making an effort to learn basic Cantonese, although my tones make people wince, and putting myself out there: these things helped me to transcend between these worlds and experience a little of all of them. From hotpot nights and card games in halls, shopping in Mong Kok, hiking mountains on Lantau, underground clubs in apartment buildings, art exhibitions at the Langnam – there was always something new to discover.
And although the US seems to be a more popular exchange destination for the party experience, my over-spent budget and I can testify to the fact HK does more than hold its own in that department. The night starts at 1AM and finishes when the MTR starts running in the morning again. It’s cliché to say you don’t have as many responsibilities on exchange, but it’s true. Whether it’s partying, or travelling, or just hanging out with new friends, those moments can be treasured easily, although they’ll be over before you know it.
- Georgia studied abroad at City University in Hong Kong, Hong Kong
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