Most of my mornings start off with the most important question: “Should I take the bus or the MTR today?” If you’re a commuting student, or at least live in a dormitory half an hour away from school, this is the most important question of the day. On this day, the answer was the bus. The bus ride is typically filled with nice scenery of the surrounding islands and working boats, all while being a very intense 20 minutes. You will find that bus drivers in Hong Kong drive very fast, as is the driving culture here. My Fridays typically start off with a 10:30 am tutorial—what we call recitations at Drexel—and in today’s tutorial, we discussed the readings for my Multinational and Global Economy class.
After class, I usually walk over to one of the several canteens on campus for my first meal. I was particularly in the mood for beef curry with rice, which ended up being spicier than I expected. Over the course of my time here, I have been able to experiment with different spice levels and flavors, usually not available in the States.
Most days, I have one to two classes with a small gap in-between, but on Fridays, I have two classes with a 3-hour gap. On this particular Friday, after my lunch break, I went on to do work in the Learning Commons at HKU. Similar to a library, they have a lot of study desks available and even desktops for students to use should they need them. After sending some co-op emails and getting a couple more things for Drexel done, it’s time to head to class.
My afternoon class is about 3 hours long with two 5-minute breaks in between. Although it’s a very activity-focused course, my friends and I are already thinking about dinner plans. Once it gets to 5:20 pm, we head on over to try a new restaurant for dinner. Today’s choice was a birria taco restaurant because another friend and I have been a bit homesick, so we wanted something that reminded us of home.
After dinner, there is bound to be dessert, which, after careful deliberation, we decide on shaved ice from a popular place called “Shari Shari“. In Hong Kong, there are a lot of dessert places all around the city; sometimes, I even notice more of these than food options, which is the beauty of it, if you ask me. As it started to approach 10 pm, we made our way to our dorm, where we played a friendly game of Mahjong. My more experienced suite mates taught us, and now we have a miniature version we play in our free time.
Not all days look like this, but on a good studious day, this is a typical day in the life of studying in Hong Kong.
