Temporary Expat

Halfway...

I've been here for three weeks now already... Time flies when your having fun. The IDO project lasts six weeks, so we're halfway already.


Last weekend I was quite tired from the trip to China, so I didnt really do much then...
Walked around, visited a temple, sat in a park, took the escalators up to the mid-levels, saw X-Men 3 and did a bit of shopping.

This week, we have been working hard on developing ideas and concepts for the project. This morning each group gave a 15 minute presentation about this. In the afternoon, we heard there was a 'black rainstorm alert (with black being the highest, red medium and yellow lowest), which meant that all schools and shops close, so we could go home early. Soon after we left the school the rain stopped though, and the shops never closed, so the rain alert was no big deal. This evening however there was quite some thunder and heavy rain, so I was glad to be indoors. That's a bit of a pity; the weather here in HK hasn't been great since we're here. Mostly cloudy and rainy and the forecast for the coming week is the same. Hope to see some sun while I'm here, so I can go and checkout the nature around here.

To give you an impression of what we're doing here, I've posted some pictures of the school. We all work every day in our own room, with 4 tables for each group. In this room, we get lectures, we do brainstorms, draw, work on the computer, have group discussions, presentations, everything. Unfortunately it has no windows, so we don't see much sunlight during the day.

So let me describe a typical day for me in HK:

• Alarm clock rings around 7:30, or 8:00. I hit snooze a couple of times before I actually get up...
• Take a shower (good showers here).
• Breakfast: in the first week I had breakfast at the hostel restaurant, and ate toast with eggs everyday, but to protect my cholesterol level (and to save some time), I now stop by a bakery across the street to get some orangje juice and croissants to go.
• We then take the bus to the school, takes about 25 minutes. We start at 10 am, but I like to be a bit earlier, relax and check my email first.
• Around 12:3o we go out to have lunch, at a different place each day. One time this week I went with some of the HK students to a 'K-lunch', a Karaokebar where you can have lunch and sing at the same time! We had a long break that day, so we really enjoyed ourselves. It's a typical karaoke place, where you have your own room with a karaoke set, and you just order some food which they bring to the room. Quite cheap too, actually.
• After lunch we work on until about 18:00 or sometimes later. Really depends on the amount of work we need to do. If we have a presentation the next day, we might stay at the school until very late, even though yesterday my group finished really early, around 17:30, while most of the other groups worked very late.
• After school, I go and have dinner with some people at a restaurant. Food here is quite cheap. You can eat very well for only 3 or 4 euro.
• Usually get back to the hotel quite late. There's a basketball field next to the building, where we sometimes shoot some hoops at night. Good to get some exercise. The sweat makes you take another shower though.
  
• Bedtime...
  

Mondays and wednesdays are working days, so we can plan our day ourselves and do as we like. Tuesdays and thursdays we have meetings with our tutors and lectures (e.g. about presenting).
Each friday we present the results of the week, like we did today. My group's presentation went quite well. We all had to rate eachother, and our group scored highest, together with another group.

I also saw The Da Vinci Code this week. It was okay, entertaining. It was exactly like the book, which of course is better...

To see more photos, go here.

posted by Patrick @ 4:12 AM Comments: 0