Post the Fifth - Days, Camera, ACTION! Part One

It's been only a few days since I posted, and so much has happened I'm pretty sure I've forgotten half of it.

We rewind to January 9th, the day of orientation. A group of us got together in front of PMSR (my dorm) to walk to the bus stop, which is up the road and to the right a bit. I've met people from all over the place now - Denmark, Mainland China, Canada, Japan, and a bunch of places that I've forgotten. We took the bus over to the main campus and went to orientation, which was in the Rayson Huang Theater, a nice sized theater that apparently fit 300 international students.

We were divided up by continent for seating, so US and Canada were put together. They began the orientation with a brief welcome before having a student group from one of the dorms (I don't remember which one) perform a lion dance. Each dorm has very different traditions, and the inter-dorm sports is very competitive. PMSR is classified as a "non-hall student residence", so we don't participate. Makes sense, really, since most (if not all) of the students residing here are exchange students. But coming back to orientation, the lion dance was interesting, though I'm not sure if they're considered good... the coordination was off a bit, but I'll leave that to those familiar to lion dance to judge (I uploaded the videos to YouTube, check the group for the link). After the lion dance, we had a few more presentations as well as an icebreaking game - we had to introduce our countries to the other exchange students via a drawing boards. The US, being the large majority, had three boards. Our group had no talented artists, so the girl with the board simply drew a big circle to represent America. We then called out words associated with the US and drew arrows to where their general location was (Ex: We had Starbucks, which pointed to Seattle). The whole orientation went from 9:45 to 1:15ish, so it was fairly long.

We went from Rayson Huang over to Swire Hall, one of the two HKU dorms that is actually on campus, and I'll take a brief break to talk about the dorms again.

So there are only two dorms on campus, as stated above, which means the rest clearly are not on campus. There are two other major groups that I'm aware of - the Pokfulam Road dorms and the Sassoon Road dorms. The Pokfulam Road dorms are about five minutes away from campus and include Starr Hall, one of the newest and the largest HKU dorm; and Lady Ho Tung Hall, the all girls dorm; as well as several others. The Sassoon Road dorms are right next to PMSR and I've been told that they are, I quote, "shit holes". So I consider myself rather lucky. The Sassoon Road dorms are next to Queen Mary's Hospital as well as the HKU medical campus, so they are technically close. There are a few more dorms even further off from the main campus than the Sassoon Road dorms, but I don't remember their names. Thus concludes the lecture on HKU dorms.

Swire Hall is home to the Global Lounge, a place for international students to hang out and catch up with their home countries. We enjoyed a free lunch here (three small sandwiches and an apple) and got to meet a few more international students. I guess there are only three people from UoI altogether, and so we met for the first time. Afterwards, we had a meeting with the US consulate, who took the time to tell us how not to get in trouble before giving a campaign speech to join the foreign service. It was interesting, but rather long.

At this point, orientation was formally over, so we split up with the agreement to meet up in about an hour to do some basic shopping. I went to Engineering to clear up a few things before journeying to find the CS department. It took me a bit, but I finally got there with the help of two local students. I was able to clear a few things up in terms of classes, but apparently I have an email account with the CS department that I need to set up.

We met up again and walked down to Queen's Row, home to small shops and awesome bakeries. Which leads to the amazingness that is the bakery.

The bakeries here are AMAZING. They put their pastries out in the window for you to drool over, and they taste as good as they look. I have yet to eat a pastry here that I haven't loved. Milk buns are amazing, as are the pastries. The bakeries also sell bread and salty pastries (pastries with meat filling, mini pizzas, etc) which are phenomenal. You find a bakery and you're set for life.

I'll take a break here and post more later since I'm getting really distracted from this post. More later.