Unforbidding City

A couple of weekends ago we had the unique opportunity to attend the City University Banquet. This is an annual event put on by the Student Union, largely as a fundraiser but also in large part as a hell-raiser. (Hey now!) One of the open spaces, normally a rather staid taxi drop-off point near the gym and the main administration building, gets transformed into a giant sea of tables, with a stage at one end and massive sound and lighting gear all over. Here’s an overview:

On most days, this space is basically empty.

Some serious lighting. Some seriously loud audio.

Tickets to attend aren’t super expensive, but they aren’t super cheap either. My office purchased an entire table, so we were there with a bunch of colleagues.

Continue reading →

The US Consulate had a very nice Election Day event on Wednesday. Yup, on Wednesday—because of the time difference (during standard time we’re 13 hours ahead of the East Coast), we had the rather pleasant experience of being able to “stay up” to watch the returns come in, and all the speeches get made, and then enjoy a mid-afternoon glass of champagne before heading off to dinner. It felt very civilized.

The event was intended principally for local college faculty to bring 10-12 of their students to witness Democracy In Action. So there was a mock voting booth, some speeches from the consul general, a pitch for students to consider studying in the US, and so on.

The student-to-balloon ratio was roughly 2:1.

The invitation had promised food that was “American fare,” so we were pretty excited about that. When we got to the consulate, we saw a Pizza Hut delivery moped outside and thought “It can’t be….” But it was! Pizza Hut pizza for all to enjoy. Cate got a slice, leaned down to take a bite, and recoiled. Imagine our dismay when we learned that, in Hong Kong style, the pizza had seafood on it. Sure, you can get clams casino pizza in New Haven, but come on. Continue reading →

This post has taken a while to write.

The majority of our trip to Shenzhen, as I described in my last post, was a more-or-less wacky good time. It was a bit disorienting, to be sure, but we felt pretty much on solid ground—a little research and a good amount of time in HK had prepared us pretty well for the whole thing, and while the shopping experience was certainly surreal in some ways, it was still well within the realm of the ‘normal’ world.

But the entire atmosphere of Shenzhen, for whatever reason, gave me a vague sense of apprehension almost from the moment we crossed the border. It’s difficult to describe. There was no sense of immediate physical threat, nor pity, nor surveillance. Just a weird, latent tremor. Continue reading →

There is quite a nice gym here at CityU. There are things about it that very much make it seem not like an American gym—way more badminton and table tennis courts than basketball, for example—but that’s fine. It’s got one of those swanky golf simulation rooms, where you can do driving practice in front of a screen that projects a fairway on it, and estimates your drive length once the ball hits the screen. I don’t golf, but that’s high-tech cool. It’s even got a gorgeous outdoor pool:

Nice stuff, right? (Image from CityU)

It also has a fitness room: you know, where the weights and treadmills and stuff are found. I was getting an informal tour of the campus when we first arrived back in September, and I thought Great! This means I don’t have to pay for a membership to a private gym.

I didn’t know about The Class, though. Or the online booking. Continue reading →

Hong Kong has two official languages: Cantonese and English. Some people speak both fluently (in my experience, native Hong Kongers who were educated in the UK or US). Most people speak one fluently and the other to some degree. Some people speak only one, and look blankly at an interlocutor when confronted with the other.

We are in that last group. Continue reading →

A couple of weeks ago Cate and I met up with a friend who was in town for a day and headed out to Stanley, a little town (and tourist attraction) on the southeast side of HK Island. Would you like to see where that is? I will show you through the miracle of embedded maps.

It’s not super easy to get to Stanley via public transportation, but fortunately cabs here are very, very reasonable. We took a cab from Central, a gorgeous 20-minute trip along winding seaside cliffs, and it cost HK$100 (about US$13). Nice. Continue reading →