Things I Miss About Mizzou

BAD TECHNOLOGY.

1 The proliferation of Macs: Most of the computers at HKU are Dell, and they all seem to be at least a few years old — dusty and bulky. There are a couple of computer labs on campus, all of which are filled to capacity at any given hour. This wouldn’t matter to me but for the fact that remote printing does not exist at HKU. The only way to print is to log into a computer on campus, which might be near impossible depending on how many students are [infuriatingly] surfing Facebook in the computer lab. Additionally, the computers in the library take literally five whole minutes to log in, which is simply baffling. Is HKU hurting for money? Can they not invest in some better computers? The campus seems to be advanced, but this printing issue [as well as the completely non-centralized course registration process] reveals that HKU is still technologically lacking.
Anyway, the computer labs I frequent at Mizzou are much more advanced [and less crowded!] than the ones here, and I will no longer take that for granted.

2 ACF [Asian Christian Fellowship]: I’ve spent the past two and a half years building and attending the same fellowship, and recently it has started to feel like a genuine family. This kind of love is difficult to replace, especially in a place where the main Christian fellowship on campus is strictly Cantonese-speaking.

3 Wal-mart: Need I say any more? Sure, Hong Kong is definitely not lacking in shopping, but it’s so hard for me to find what I need in their stores. Not only am I unfamiliar with the places, most of them are crammed to the brim, which is bad for my attention span and also makes it impossible for me to find hangers. Seriously, the first time I went to Wellcome [deliberately spelled incorrectly? Don’t know, but it's the closest equivalent], I found a bunch of cheap hangers, but the past three or four times I’ve been there, I cannot track them down again.
Thus, the majority of my clothing is still in my suitcase, which lies on the ground at the foot of my bed. This lifestyle is okay with me, but one of my roommates has expressed her dissatisfaction with its presence. Well, aren’t I entitled to the six square feet of space at the end of my bed? It’s not my fault it’s in the middle of the room; I didn’t get to choose my bed :(

4 Flat land: Mountains are cool and all, but it’s a bit ridiculous to have to take two long sets of stairs and then an elevator just to get from the entrance of campus onto the actual campus.

Quick Update

I’ve been to Shenzhen [mainland China] twice this past week, and I’ll post on them when I have more time to write. For now, I’ll make a quick list of advantages & disadvantages.

Pros:

+People speak Mandarin! I feel useful!
+Signs are in simplified Chinese instead of traditional. My reading abilities are still limited though.
+Food is almost unbelievably cheap.
+In fact, almost everything is cheaper. Transportation, services, shoes…
+The Metra system is similar to that of HK and is easy to use.
+Activities there don’t seem as cliché as HK because exchange students rarely go to Shenzhen.
+I have a multiple entry visa, which means I can go as often as I like [I think].
+Cars drive on the right side of the road.
+It has that familiar smell of the motherland.

Cons:

-English is no longer ubiquitous on signs.
-It’s not as clean as Hong Kong. People on the mainland allow their babies to run around with their butts hanging out…I’ve seen it in more than one city.
-SQUAT TOILETS :(
-The exchange rate from USD is not as advantageous as changing to HKD.
-The border closes at midnight, with the last train leaving at 11PM.
-It takes over an hour to get to the border & another 30 minutes to cross over.
-People say that pickpockets are common, though thankfully nobody I know has lost anything.
-Traffic is much less organized than in HK, and pedestrians are basically moving targets.
-The smell of the motherland is mostly pollution mixed with sewage, garbage and cigarette smoke.
-Some are still unused to foreigners and might ask to take pictures with white people if given the chance.

LOL WHAT IS THIS IDEK

My Facebook feed sometimes shows me the most unwanted things:

“Larry likes this”?!

This, of course, led to some nostalgia [and more creeping, naturally]. My brother is in 8th grade while Lisa, whose older sister I’ve known since middle school, is in 9th grade. That was around the age when a younger boy developed a serious crush on me…that had better not be what’s happening here! But if it occurs over Facebook, I’ll be here to witness it all [muahaha]!

Anyway, I have no idea what’s happening here:

I think I need to go to sleep…

[Related: his religion used to be listed as "Christian." Now it is no longer there...]

For Satire-Loving Cynics

A more mature version of Curious George.

Showers

The morning after I arrived in Hong Kong, I took a shower to scrub off the grime of traveling. I’ve never had communal floor showers before, but the stalls looked relatively clean, so I thought I’d give it a go. I entered the stall and turned on the water, but it sprayed harder than I expected and left a puddle outside the shower curtain.

I hopped into the next shower and turned it on, but it wouldn’t warm up, even on the hottest setting. The water felt tolerable on my arm, so I stuck my whole head under it. This turned out to be a bad decision, because the water was freezing. I tried to get minimally wet while washing my hair as I took the one of the shortest showers of my life. Teeth chattering, I wrapped myself in my towel and hurried back to my room, which was just as cold.

Rosaline was still sleeping, but Nadia was awake, and I asked her if the hot water turned on or off at a certain time of day, since I remembered that would be the case sometimes in mainland China due to water shortages.

“You have to turn on the hot water separately,” Rosaline mutter from underneath the covers.
“What??” I asked, thinking back to if I’d seen another lever in the shower stall.
“The switches are by the door, next to the light switch.”
“Ohh…”

The next morning, I was determined to have a pleasant bathing experience. Armed with my towel and shampoo, I marched to the shower room and flipped the switch for stall #4, closest to the windows [opaque ones, don't worry]. Even though I turned on the hot water, it only got lukewarm at best. Disappointed, I cleaned myself quickly and jumped out. I usually shower at night, but since I had been staying out at night until 4AM, I could only shower in the mornings.

My next experience was only slightly better — the water was scalding in the beginning, so I tried to turn it down a little bit. I had a hot shower for two minutes before it turned ass-freezingly cold again. Nadia said that the water seemed to stay warm when she showered in the evening, so I tried that the next time. It was my first enjoyable shower of the week. I haven’t completely figured out the system yet, but I hope that consistently hot showers won’t be a luxury of the past while I’m here.

ATM

Not amused.

On Wednesday, I went to the ATM on campus to withdraw some cash. Although it was not an ATM affiliated with my bank [Bank of America/China Construction Bank], I didn’t feel like traveling a mile to get to my actual ATM. Everything went hunky-dory until an error message popped up on the screen.

“Your card has been retained. Please take the receipt and inquire within the bank.”
What?

I took the slip of paper offered by the machine and entered the bank, worried that it might spit my card back out at the next person in line. After looking at the receipt, the teller told me that my card had been reported lost, and I would have to return the next day to retrieve it because they only empty out the machines at night

What a pain! I still had around $300HKD left, which I figured would last me until Thursday, so I went home only slightly frustrated.

The next day, I missed my morning class, so I took a trip to campus specifically to recover my debit card. Once I got into line, I realized that I had forgotten my passport in my room, so I offered the teller [a different person this time] my driver’s license instead.

She was reluctant to accept it, but after I explained my problem, she told me that because my card had been reported lost, they CANCELED IT, and I wouldn’t ever be able to get it back.

WHAT!
GG.

Thankfully, it was only a temporary debit card — I had just opened a new account with Bank of America, and my permanent debit card was supposed to be coming in the mail. I was perturbed and frustrated but not too worried about my situation, although it did mean that I wouldn’t be able to do any shopping for a few days.

At Last

I just got back from watching Avatar [thanks for taking me, Philip!], and my mind has been blown. [It was my first 3D movie!] It’s a little late to write a full review, so I’ll just share my thoughts briefly.

1. Holy cow, they are beautiful. There aren’t a lot of butt shots, but the men wear these little thongs…

2. The big red dragon [Toruk Makto] resembles a Pokémon: a cross between a Latias & that thing on the cover of Ruby.

3. I understand that the frustrating corporate forces are part of the story, but it’s unoriginal and one-dimensional. That colonel’s character is difficult to believe.

4. Na’vi, like Vulcans, are seemingly perfect life forms that we think we want to be, but do we really? Could we really live that way after existing in the attention-deficit, irreverent universe that is 2010?

5. It’s all a bit self-loathing. Yay the humans are dying/losing!

6. Like for Jake, this fantasy makes real life seem trivial.

7. I’m glad American movies generally are guaranteed a happy ending.

8. I was thinking of joining Archery Club at HKU before watching this film, and now that I’ve seen it…how could I not try it out?

Hall

Don't leave me here...

My residence hall is not an actual dorm, and it is not one that I had even heard of before getting my housing assignment. Its name is Patrick Manson [we call it PM for short], and is pretty much the farthest residence hall from campus that I know of. Indeed, it would take me more than 30 minutes to walk to campus, so I have to take a bus to and fro. The closest facilities are a 7-11, the hospital, and a canteen [cafeteria] that most people denounce as gross.

Yet, they filled this hall with female exchange students. We don’t even have a front desk, much less the hall life that is touted in HKU brochures. That means no hall activities, no hall sports teams, no hall spirit — only the security guard that comes at night. If we need maintenance or a piano room [things normally available on a hall’s first floor], we have to walk over to the building next door.

The hallways are narrow and dim, as if one is in a warehouse rather than college student residence. The laundry room only has four machines, so it’s amazing to me that it would be able to handle the laundry of 100 girls. The building has no heaters, which makes the place feel damp and chilly even in this relatively mild HK winter. Our “mailboxes” are more like cubbyholes — no security at all. When my new debit card arrives in the mail, anybody would be able to just take it.

What are the advantages of living here?

Well, nobody plays soccer/hockey in the hallways at night [apparently this is a habit of guys in certain other halls]. Because we don’t have a front desk, security is very lax, and we don’t need to sign in our guests or worry too much about possession of alcohol [curfew and prohibition are stated but not exactly enforced], not that the latter applies to me. The only other one I can think of is that the toilet paper is of a remarkable caliber. Even the Scott tissues that I bought were of lower quality.

Roommates

To make blogging more manageable, I’ve decided to do shorter, topical posts instead of lengthy ramblings. Here goes!

For the past year & a half, I’ve been living with two roommates while at school, though off-campus. This, however, is my first time in a dorm with two roommates. I believe ours is the only triple on the floor, and thus our room is significantly larger than the others that I’ve seen.

Because I was the last one to move in, I was stuck with the middle bed, which is a strange situation for me because I always sleep by a wall. So far it’s been good, though three girls with long dark hair tend to shed a lot.

One of my roommates, Rosaline, is from California, and she’s been here since last semester; she enjoyed HKU so much that she extended her stay when she was supposed to graduate a semester early. She also speaks Cantonese, which allows her to be doubly helpful whenever we go out. Although she seems to be a rather unassuming person, she’s gone out almost every single night since I’ve gotten here, so she’s quite the social butterfly. Rosaline likes Kpop, which is always a plus, though her tastes are more akin to LC’s: Big Bang, Siwan/Kyuhyun/Donghae, Taecyeon & dramas.

My other roommate, Nadia, is from Denmark, where their education system differs vastly; she’s a college senior at the age of 27, which is apparently normal over there. Danish is her first language, but I didn’t even know because her English is quite good. Nadia is half Danish and half Thai, and she’s had a lot of experience traveling to different places, so she’s good to go out with as well. Her boyfriend, who is apparently coming to visit during Easter, is Irish [I think she told me he’s 12 years her senior?], so I’ll hopefully get to meet him sometime.

Both of my roommates are open and easy to get along with, so I don’t think we’ll have any troubles this semester. They also have a good balance between talking and sleeping, which I appreciate.

Malady

This is what I felt like when I was sick during badminton season away games — I’d step outside after school and it would be cheerfully sunny, but I’d feel too crappy to appreciate it, and I’d still have to play whatever school we were scheduled to beat that day.

Anyway, I had more I wanted to write but it’ll have to wait until I get healthy.