Tempest7: Blogger

University of Hong Kong

I have a day off so I decided to walk around to learn about my environment a bit. I wanted to visit the Central library since it seems like such a landmark here. The library is pretty nice, several floors with a lot of space. The view is quite nice from the library windows and there are tons of computers for people to use. I did not have a library card to access the system however. I continued my tour down the smaller streets around Causeway Bay. I ended up walking int "Lee Gardens" some high class, fancy shopping mall. A lot of name brand expensive stuff in here. Down below at the basement level of the mall there is a supermarket or grocery store. This seems to be the common trend, a lot of the shopping malls, like Sogo and Times Square, have supermarkets down below. I went to take a look for tortilla chips. While I was down near the diary section looking at what kind of milk selection they had an employee offered me a sample of some chocolate. He started talking to me, first in Cantonese then in English. Asking me about where I had bought my ipod shuffle case, and where I was from and such. After he started getting so friendly, he had a lot of the stereotypical "gay" characteristics. A slight lisp, some very feminine stances and behaviour. I cut the conversation short, thanked him and moved on quickly. I think De will get a kick when she hears about this.

I continued walking and ended up some place just past Wan Chai when Ada called me. She was just getting off of work and we decided to meet up in Wan Chai. Ada took me to the last place I should step into. The computer shopping mall in Wan Chai. The place is filled with so many little toys. I looked at a few and it already started me thinking about what upgrades I need for my computer. The things I had in mind where to replace my current harddrive with something bigger and faster. To replace my cdwriter/dvd combo drive with a dvd writer. To buy an external USB harddrive. To buy a set of USB powered speakers for my notebook and Wendy had a few things she wanted to shop for as well. I ended up just walking through quickly, I didn't want to be tempted at this stage because I was so poor. We wandered the streets a bit afterwards and saw some of the market areas. There are tons of these chinese style markets here of course. I still hesitate to go into them to buy things, I'm just so use to supermarkets. I was getting a little tired at this point so we headed over to a Starbucks to sit and chat.

Ada had class that evening at the University of Hong Kong. I remember my cousin's pictures of the University of Shanghai and wanted to check out HKU. The areas I saw was pretty small. Not that pretty but gave me a flood of memories from Waterloo. They have a new building that seems very modern, and not suited to the Campus (a la Davis Centre) and stuck out like a sore thumb. I tried to sneak into class and well, I got caught right away. I was told there is usually more guys but that day there happen to only be 2 other guys, when I walked in, and a forth guy (counting me) showed up afterwards. There are tons of people late for that class and the speaker at that time was an Austrialian fellow. He picked me out right away and asked me for my name. Luckily it was all in English which I think won some favours. I explained quickly I had just arrived from Canada and I was visiting friends (Ada I suppose) and he seem to accept it and let me hang around class. I think he is a baseball fan because he was asking me about the Toronto Bluejays. He said later on in the break I would give a presentation about the Bluejays.

Great, I have no clue about the Bluejays. The only reason I know anything about them is because of Tomoka and Rui. The professor ended up being quite a joker, picking on other members of the class. It was strange because they basically held it in a computer lab like environment (but filled with IBM notebooks) and class was held in English. The lesson was about making a change in your educational work environment. The class centred around influencing one's principle and co-workers and improving your political situtation at work. I ended up staying for the whole thing and we went out to eat Won Ton mien afterwards which Ada knows fills my HK criteria of cheap and good tasting.

posted by Tempest7 @ 22:00