Sophomore summer now comes to a close—from a last minute performance of Schubert’s Trout Quintet to finishing two weeks’ worth of engineering classes at the Regal Airport Hotel with semi-edible food, I can definitely say it’s the least I’ve slept in a while 😛
The Journey
Starting at Boston Logan, the plane took off at 1:45 AM EDT on Aug. 16th. Our great circle route (see below) nearly took us over the North Pole (ho ho ho!) as well as Beijing and Wuhan. I landed at 5 AM HKT on Tuesday morning, and nearly got a heart attack when I received a message from my aunt telling me that Hong Kong just changed the U.S. to a “high-risk” country, meaning that non-HK residents originating from the U.S. would be banned from entering (thanks Florida)! Luckily, the policy would begin enforcement on Aug. 20th, thus sparing me from 21 days in “prison”, or as the HKSAR government calls it, quarantine.
Everything from landing on was really organized—airport staff took us through the different areas of the airport, getting our quarantine orders, testing, and hotel reservations pretty quickly.
As my flight group waited for its test results, the person sitting next to me (not pictured) happened to notice my Dartmouth shirt (mission accomplished lol). She introduced herself as Urbashi Poddar, the wife of Dartmouth Professor Kofi M. Odame, the Thayer professor who I was doing research with this summer! (If I remember correctly, she’s a Hong Kong native and was back to visit her family). I vaguely remembered back in one of our weekly meetings that he told me about this and as it would happen, we ended up in consecutive seats at the holding area and expressed equal surprise at the circumstances which brought us here. She pointed out a few other Dartmouth alumni who were also sitting nearby, even meeting one who then invited both of us to the Dartmouth HK WhatsApp group.
After reaching immigration, we parted ways to go to our individual quarantine hotels. While she got a view like this:
I got stuck with this:
Quarantine rules state that you are not allowed to leave your room (your room card only works once), so our meals were delivered to a chair outside our rooms. Speaking of the meals: breakfasts were the occasional scrambled or hard-boiled eggs, sausages, and/or croissants with a small juice box of tea; lunches and dinners consisted of rice, boiled vegetables with no seasonings (lol), and some sort of meat in sauce. I was on the seventh floor and the staff usually go floor by floor so most of the time, the meals were already lukewarm by the time they were delivered 🙁
You are actually allowed takeout deliveries (i.e. ordering through an app), so I downloaded one and saw that there were absolutely no options near the airport hotel besides a small convenience store—I ordered some fried dace in black bean oil (a Cantonese staple) and some iced green tea thinking it was sweet, but when the order got to my door, there were no cans of dace (they were out) and the green tea was actually unsweetened ._. ……… just my luck *shrug*, I didn’t try delivery again after that lol
On the 3rd, 7th, and 12th days, staff would come up to your room to do a COVID test like so, but other than that, there is no human interaction before day 15, when I was finally released. Stuck in that room while pulling occasional 9pm – 6am workdays to finish our ENGS 31 Add/Subtract Multiply FPGA calculator with my project partner Katherine Lasonde for two straight weeks wasn’t the most fun (an understatement), but after finishing that, a grueling E22 final and Lab 8, and project documentation, I got to trade it for this:
I left my quarantine hotel around 12pm on Aug. 31st. From the airport hotel, I took a taxi to Ho Man Tin (何文田), the district where my aunt and uncle live. Even getting in the taxi felt weird—from suddenly not talking to anyone except on Zoom for two weeks to suddenly conversing with the driver in Mandarin (普通话) trying to describe what Dartmouth and the U.S. COVID situation is like was definitely an experience…
Cultural aside: Cantonese (广东话: the dialect of Guangdong/Hong Kong) is the primary language heard throughout the city. Because Hong Kong was previously a British colony, most of the population (less some of older folks) also speaks English. Plus, nowadays, because of the increasing connectivity between Hong Kong and the mainland, many people also speak a mix of Mandarin (depends on the demographic)! My guess is that if you don’t speak Cantonese, you can still communicate with nearly 95% of the population by speaking the other two. Luckily for me, I speak English and passable Mandarin—so far, I haven’t met anyone that doesn’t speak either! Also, funnily enough, there’s a lot of English loanwords in HK Cantonese like 巴士 (bāshì), literally “bus” in English. (Apparently HK Cantonese and Mainland Cantonese also have slight differences due to the separate development of the language while HK was a colony, see this Wikipedia article if you’re interested).
I was greeted by my aunt upon arrival—it was my first time seeing my extended family in nearly 7 years (the last time was in 2014 in Atlanta, GA, since that’s where they were due to my uncle’s job as an upper exec for GE lol). It was around lunchtime which meant good eatz so we went to the shop right underneath their apartment complex. Honestly, I wouldn’t know personally, but I’d describe walking into that dim sum place like letting a starving man into a buffet—I had to be careful not to overeat and die from the food cuz my god, having those dishes placed in front of me really tested my resolve to have manners in front of my family
Going from half-microwaved boxed rice & veggies to literally artisan cuisine that was surprisingly cheap:
(I mean obviously ya’ll expected to see some food pics amirite hehehehe)
(More pics are on the way :))))))))))) )
The Destination
Anyways, from that day on, it’s just been a matter of relaxing and taking care of preterm arrival logistics like choosing classes and Hong Kong survival. Cuz I’ve just kind of been chilling, it’s easiest to just itemize the experience:
- Octopus Card & the Hong Kong MTR (subway):
- The Octopus Card (八達通) is a city-wide cash card that can be used almost anywhere, including the metro, most shops, and restaurants. Getting a student version also means cheaper fares muahahaha
- Climate:
- At least it’s consistent ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- COVID:
- Even tho there’s been almost 0 locally transmitted cases for nearly the entire pandemic, everyone still wears masks outside & indoors except in restaurants (obviously). I don’t foresee this changing anytime soon, even though Hong Kong’s vaccination rate is climbing steadily (currently at 46% fully vaccinated as of this post’s date).
- All you have to do is to use a contact tracing app called LeaveHomeSafe: every building you enter will have a QR code posted at the entrance for you to scan with the app, thus marking you as having entered the building, and then when you leave, you just open the app again to click “leave”. Pretty convenient.
- Y’all, the public busses are double-deckers
- There’s a Tesla every 20 cars (a little more than however many you see in Hanover)
- HK drives on the left side of the road:
- Cuz there’s lots of people from other countries that drive on the right, there’s always a sign on the road at uncontrolled crosswalks reminding you which way to look before you cross
- There’s literally so many skyscrapers everywhere:
Lastly, *Nice*
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Ok back to the interview grind 😤
I’m trying out this “subscribe” feature, put your blitz in the subscribe box in the bottom right corner and I think you’ll be notified of new posts I make?? Idk, we’ll see in two weeks when I make another post heh
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