e-Blog (International Students)

Through a couple of lucky coincidences, my friends and I crashed a Karaoke birthday party of a local girl. We didn’t actually crash it, we were kind of invited, but only one person of our group of four knew the birthday girl, so it felt a bit weird to go there. Upon arriving, I also realized that I was totally underdressed, as the place was kind of fancy, but I was wearing shorts. When we entered, everyone at the party started clapping and cheering, and I felt really awkward, as I’m not used to flattery like this, and we were also kind of late. Still, when I realized that people were genuinely nice, I felt a lot better; and even the fact that I had to introduce myself on a microphone didn’t bother me much. Even though our appalling Karaoke skills must have shocked all the great singers there, I made a lot of new local friends. I still hang out with some of them until today, and they have shown me some nice parts of Hong Kong and helped me to understand the culture here greatly. All in all, I’d say the party was a great success.

On one sunny Saturday, two local girls I made friends with organized an amazing trip to Sai Kung, the green soul of Hong Kong, for me and some of my friends. After hanging out at the pier in Sai Kung and taking some pictures of the great atmosphere there, they took us to a floating platform on the sea that could only be reached by boat, where we spent the whole day just relaxing. In the end, we were a pretty mixed group, consisting of four people from Central Europe, two Skandinavian girls, four people form Taiwan, and three locals. We would sit in the sun, chat, go for a swim, play Mahjongg (although they had to teach me how to play first), fishing (without success, though), and in the evening, we would have a tasty BBQ together - the girls had thought of everything and even brought delicious local food, some of which I had never even seen before. It was a great day and the fact that we didn’t get a cab back and had to walk a fair share of the way in the night only added to the excitement of the trip. 

22/9/2013 Sunday

The day typhoon Usagi was about to hit Hong Kong, I was not sure what to expect. I had never experienced a typhoon before, and the media coverage was pretty intense; everyone was afraid of the storm, and watching people at the local grocery store stockpile to such an extent that half the goods were sold out, I felt a bit uneasy. Still, I planned to stay in and was not too worried. I met up with some exchange students in our hall, and we would play some poker and watch the weather from safety of our dorm. When we realized, however, that the storm wouldn’t hit us properly, we grabbed our bathing suits and went outside for a typhoon run. It was great fun and we got wet to the bone. We ended up spending more than three hours in the rain, just fooling around and having fun with a lot of new friends that had about the same idea. When I went back to my room at about 3am, I was wet, tired, but felt great – and before I went to bed, I took my first hot shower here in Hong Kong. 

5/10/2013 Saturday

We wanted to use the last warm days of Summer for a beach camping trip. So, on 5th October we left home early and went to Sai Kung for a long hike. We first went to Sai Wan village, where there is not only a nice beach, but also a great waterfall with a natural pool, which is just made for cliff jumping. I’ve never before done cliff jumping from a ledge this high, so jumping took me a bit of guts. It was a great feeling though, particularly how everyone there would just lazily sit in the pool and watch the cliff jumpers, occasionally cheering or encouraging them to jump. We then proceeded to Tim Han beach, which was even more beautiful than Sai Wan. We rented some tents and set up camp directly at the beach, with a nice comfy campfire in the middle. More and more people we knew arrived, so we ended up as a group of about 40 people, sharing a BBQ under the starry sky of Sai Kung. After spending the night there and watching the beautiful sunrise, we were too tired to hike home, that’s why we took the speedboat back.