Hullo! My blog has come to life again with
yet another blog post, brought to you from a land 4 hours away from the sunny shores of Singapore!
In this latest instalment on my exciting life in foreign soil, I shall tell you all what I do everyday! Oh-hoho, aren't you just holding your breath in excitement! I can tell!
Ok, you ready? Sure? Alright!
In the morning/afternoon, I wake up. And, more often than not, press the snooze button or think about going back to sleep/skipping the class. But I never do (the latter). So there. I will admit, though, that I've become lazier here. I never 賴床 as much as I do here when I'm back home.
On some days, especially Wednesdays when I have my earliest class (9.30), I have breakfast! Currently, breakfast for me alternates between cereal + milk and bread + ham + cream cheese. I can't think of other options which are cheap + convenient (as in fast to make and relatively crumb and hassle-free).
After a hearty breakfast, I head off to class where I (mostly) enjoy learning (for a change) and switch on whenever I'm interested in the topic and off whenever I'm not. My lessons are either at this building which is only a 5-minute walk from my hostel, or in the old campus, which takes 15-20 minutes on foot. Sometimes when I am tired and not distracted by daydreams or companion/s, I also curse the slope and scary drivers on my way to school. If the weather is too cold or too hot (which is often the case), it gets a mental lashing from me as well.
I have many breaks in between lessons, ranging from 1-3 hours. During these breaks, I usually go to the library because I am too lazy to go back to the hostel. Besides being nearer, the library also doesn't require me to fumble for my access card and door key, nor take off my shoes. Which is strenous exercise. At the library, I either do readings for my journalism assignments or just check my emails and stuff on the computer.
When it is time for lunch, I usually meet my fellow NTU exchange students at the hostel cafeteria (yes, there is only one here unlike in NTU). There, I usually have char siew rice or some 菜飯 as they are cheaper and more ok-tasting. Food in HK is more expensive than Singapore (S$4 is the lowest price for dishes with rice and S$3+ for instant noodles plus some meat). But the rice helpings are larger, so I foresee an adjustment period of hunger waiting for me when I return.
Night is when a greater variety of activities await me. For dinner, I always meet my Singaporean friends (+ 1 or 2 other international pals, occasionally) and go to the Taiwanese/Japanese food restaurant or a dingy place near our hostel, or take a 20-minute walk to one of the three nearest areas. We don't take the public transport here much, mainly to save money and exercise. Besides, the mini-buses move at alarming speeds, and you have to speak Cantonese to get down.
It is usually nine or past nine by the time we get back. Sometimes we do grocery shopping at one of the nearby supermarkets (about once a week). I am gradually becoming an auntie. I actually compare prices across supermarkets now *shudder*.
If we're not having dinner outside, we cook or order pizza. We've cooked curry once, had one of our roommates cook 3 dishes for us another time, and last week our Korean friend whipped up some kimchi fried rice and Korean 炸醬麵 for us. Really nice experiences. Cheap and good food. Great company. What more could you ask for, and all that.
After dinner, I do one or more of the following:
- Play ping pong with the others (yes, you can pick your jaw off the ground now)
- Go back to my room to stone and slack. Read blogs and catch up with you lot and blog and do assignments or projects. Watch youtube (sometimes only, not as often as I want to). Watch a DVD that I rented from the library. Currently I'm on Little Britain, a funny TV series. Hurray for British comedy!
- Play card games
- Discuss about the upcoming Taiwan trip
- Meet HK friends
- Shopping and eating 小吃 at Mongkok (shopping paradise)!!!
I am doing number 2 now while waiting for someone's blog to load. Number 2 is usually accompanied by much swearing about the hostel's internet connection. It really crawls at peak hour. You wouldn't believe it, really. Can't even load pages sometimes.
Although number 2 allows me to catch up with you all and get back on top of my academic stuff, I don't usually like to retire to my room early because many times, I would get bored and sian and start to think about things and people I will only be seeing in two months (and thus useless to think about now). So please forgive me if you don't often find me online at night. I really do try my best. Being a lazy student abroad comes with a lot of perks, but also a decent amount of loneliness. But never fear, the sian moments often pass and before I know it is time for bed, like now.
Me and a couple of others in the Singaporean gang would very much like to add "mahjong" to the above list, but sadly
playing mahjong is strictly banned here in the hostel (in fact, I hear that all forms of gambling besides horse-racing are banned in HK). Even the possession of mahjong sets is banned! They sure know us students well. To be fair, though, it is already quite noisy (groups of residents chatting in the open areas) without twenty ongoing mahjong sessions. Nevertheless, we are still looking for a way around it. They have mahjong cards in Women's Street! So if worse comes to worst...yeah. Haha.
Bedtime comes along at around 2 am, earlier (I try) on Tuesday nights because of the early Wednesdays. I read or play my DS before drifting off. Sometimes I have trouble getting to sleep because I woke up too late or my mind is over-stimulated by Taiwan excitement or images of Singapore and Singaporeans. But that doesn't happen often, so thank goodness.
And then come the weekends! The week rolls by pretty fast because of lessons, but the weekends positively fly by my eyes. It's so annoying how these two precious days don't slow down even when you're a lazy exchange student.
So, Saturdays! On Saturdays we try to explore a new part of Hong Kong. Alternatively, we go shopping at Mongkok (well, it IS a 買東西吃東西 land). It's freaking crowded on weekends though. We experienced total gridlock once. You literally couldn't move for the narrowness of some places and would have to wait for all the traffic from the other side to go past before you could proceed.
Every Sunday I join my friends for lunch after church, usually somewhere near there. We have dim sum sometimes (about once a month), when we're feeling like using our monthly food splurge. You can guess what we usually do for the rest of the day, after we get lunch and dinner out of the way. It starts with an 's'.
*I hope the descriptiveness of this post doesn't make it too hard to read. I just want to give you all as clear a mental picture as possible of my life here.
***
I hope all of you back in Singapore are well. Remember, you can always leave an offline message/email for me whenever you need me, or just want to update me! :D
It is hard to believe that my exchange programme will end in less than two months. It hasn't really been awfully fast. I live life by each week here as they pass by relatively quickly and make for a good unit of measurement. I can't measure it by months as it'd feel too long. And if I do it day by day, I'd feel that time was passing by too quickly for me to stop and reflect. All this still feels a little unreal to me. Honestly there are a lot of things I've learnt and experienced here, but it is hard to put it into words or know where to start. So don't blame me if I have little to say when I come back ok? The memories will come to me over time and I will share them with you, one little tidbit at a time. Be patient ok? :D I will show you the 一點一滴 of my four months here when each memory pulls itself out from the back of my mind, floats into my consciousness, and unfolds.
Labels: Memoires of Dimsumland
