Picture This

Briefly;

I made a Flickr. The address is:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/seawaterandbone/

It has all of the pictures, and gets updated a bit more often than this as it is faster.

The Cat and The Octopus

"The city of the pestilence was a prison from which she was escaped, and she had never known before how exquisite was the blueness of the sky and what joy there was in the bamboo copses that leaned with such an adorable grace across the causeway. Freedom! ...and with freedom, courage and a valiant unconcern for whatever was to come."

(W. Somerset Maugham, The Painted Veil)

TWO WEEKS. Two weeks pretty much exactly since I arrived, and how things have changed. I'm not going to do massive thing on every day because let's be honest, it would be boring. And there are only so many times you want to read "OHEMGEE!!! Saw more cats! They are soooo CUTE!". Even though it would be true. I will probably freak out on the day I don't see any cats. What is worrying is that apparently there are considerably less cats than there used to be. You probably had to wade through them. Suddenly, the "cat skiing" cover option on my insurance makes sense.

What's that? But you like the cats? Okay. One more picture won't do any harm. And I do love this particular cat. Look at him, not as good as Suspiciously-Large-Headed-Cat, but pretty suave. We call him Friendly Cat, because he lets you pet him.

The day we met Friendly Cat was the day NSO or New Student Orientation began. This apparently is designed to help you settle into university life, and show you where everything is on campus. I say apparently, because Katerina and I made an executive decision not to go, based on the advice of Robin, one of the peer mentor people. I do not want to spend an hour learning how to make a secure password when I could be out exploring. As for finding my way around campus, that is what the big maps everywhere are for. And you can't miss them, because they sing. The exchange students who did go regretted it, as the only orientation that might have been of use to them was presented in Cantonese. The seperately organised OMIP (Office of Mainland and International Programmes) orientation was considerably more useful, as they give you good advice about where to eat and suchlike. They also organised for various consulates to come in and advise the exchange students. I'm sure that would have been quite helpful, if the British Consulate had bothered to show up. But that's okay, because it let me watch them cut the grass. They take grass cutting very seriously at Lingnan University.

As part of NSO there is the Hostel Orientation Camp. This costs approximately £30 and seems to consist mainly of being dunked in tubs of water, eating aeroplane quality food, singing in Chinese at 1am, and having pies thrown at you. Needless to say, we also skipped this. Which turned out to be another genius idea, because half the people who went to it now have swine flu. Which spreads pretty rapidly here, because there is such a high volume of people tightly packed into a small area. These are some of the flats next to our uni; thousands of people live here (Fu Tai apartments).

ON TO MORE EXCITING THINGS that don't involve porcine-related infections. With all our free time, we gathered some troops and decided to visit Mongkok.

Have you finished giggling yet? (I'm talking to you, at the back. And your friend. I see you. Take deep breaths.)

Mongkok is on the Kowloon Peninsular, and you need to take 2 MTRs to get there. Ah, the MTR (or Mass Transit Railway) is brilliant. You expect something akin to the Metro or Tube, and instead you get something that is clean, efficient, cheap and air-conditioned. I recommend purchasing an Octopus card. It works similar to London's Oyster card, except you can also use it for small purchases in many shops, car parking, and, in every student hostel excluding mine, your laundry.

I interrupt this outing for a brief tangent. I like tangents. If you don't, this is the wrong blog to read. They will occur often and not always be "brief". Anyway. You wash your clothes in the laundry room on the lower ground floor of the hostel. It costs 6HKD, or about 50p. If you live in hostel A, B, D, E or F, you swipe your card, simple. If you live in C, like me, you have to use coins. And it only takes dollar coins. And they are like GOLD DUST. It is the biggest pain EVER. I have to plan how to pay for things so that I will get dollar coins as change. So tomorrow Katerina and I are going to sneak into B and use their washing machines.

Back to the story. Which will be brief, because I want to go to bed. Mongkok is bargain shopping heaven. Street after street of market stalls, selling everything you can think of, and probably some stuff you can't. Everything is cheap, and then you can haggle them down to super cheap. Buyers beware though, get a good look at what you are buying. Katerina decides to buy a wall hanging for her boyfriend, and the seller tries to roll it up quickly so she won't notice the giant crack across it. Be sharp, and watch out for people trying to rip you off. And if you're going to haggle, do it with confidence, or they will just laugh at you for being a silly tourist. Even if you don't manage to knock it down, it will still be considerably less - I find a decent sized Totoro plush for about £5, which wouldn't even buy you a Totoro keyring in England. I couldn't figure out to get it home though, so I had to pass. Also, it is worth noting that we had become accustomed to our sleepy little campus and nearby Tuen Mun, which had seemed busy but was nothing compared to here. SO MANY PEOPLE! It was nice to experience a bit of a change of pace.

Langham Place, literally across the road from the MTR station, is also worth checking out, if only for the food court which has an impressively international selection. We opt for the Japanese, which is cheap and delicious. We barely scratched the surface of the area as a whole, as we were all pretty keen to get home and catch up on sleep. So this will no doubt be somewhere we return to.

Two trains later and we're back out in the sticks, waiting at Siu Hong interchange for a bus back to campus (too tired to even consider walking). We are sweaty and horrible and most likely dehydrated (I have come to accept that I am always at least a little bit dehydrated), but here we are:

A nice little group don't you think? L-R, Jee Hee (Korea), Ling Ling (Mainland), me, Katerina (USA). Now you know who I am talking about.