First Days in Hong Kong

Ok, I’m in Hong Kong now. The weather is nice here. It’s 30+ degrees Celsius every day, but the humidity is also very high, like 85%.

I flew here with Cathay Pacific Airline, from Frankfurt to Hong Kong. It was a nonstop flight, so it was quite comfortable. The flight took about 11 hours. I only had to wait six hours at Frankfurt airport because I took a train earlier. The NS, the Dutch railways had some problems at the track which I was traveling on and I didn’t want to miss the train. Frankfurt airport is easiest the most boring international airport I’ve been on. There is only one tax free shop and one restaurant/bar after customs.

I arrived on Saturday 25^th of august, where I bought a local GSM card. Mobile phone calls in HK are really cheap. It costs HK$0.20 a minute. Too bad you have to pay to receive calls as well, but it’s only 20 cents or 2 cents in Euros. After that I bought an Octopus card, which is the local public transport payment card. It is a card based on RFID so no contact is needed between the card reader and the Octopus card. You can even use it in a lot of shops. Really convenient, it is what the Dutch wanted with the chipknip I think.

After that I waited for Frank, my fellow student who is also from Eindhoven University of Technology. He took a different flight, and arrived an hour later, so I waited at the airport and drank a fresh mango juice at some juice bar. It was really good this juice, I should try it more often.

Then together with Frank I went to the MTR station at the airport and took the airport express train to Hong Kong central. Here we got a connection to another MTR train to Mong Kok and finally to Diamond Hill MTR station. From here we took a taxi to the HKUST. The driver couldn’t speak English, but we managed to get there.

When we got here and unpacked I noticed I forgot some critical things, like my camera battery charger. Also my laptop battery charger broke down just before I went to Hong Kong, so I had to buy those. I got them at some market place in Mong Kok.

On Monday we had to register to the university, and get our student card. We also looked around campus. The scenery is great. The university is built against a mountain. So there are a lot of lifts. When you take one lift from ground floor to floor 10, there are bridges to other lifts where you’re again at ground floor. This lift will also go to floor 10. Most of the buildings are connected this way. You have to find your way around campus by lift number, because not all floors are completely connected.

In the evening we went out to Lam Kwai Fong. This is the place to be in HK for clubbing. So we went there to take a look. It was a great place to be, lots of bars and clubs. But, it was still a Monday so it was not that crowded. It was better when we got there again on Wednesday. This day we were with a lot of people from HKUST. We had a lot of fun. Only drinks are quite expensive compared to the Netherlands. A beer costs $50, which is a little bit less than 5 Euros.

Tomorrow is the welcome for exchange students, so we’ll go there and have a look. All the students we’ve met so far are Undergraduate exchange students. And their all in business and not in engineering like we are. This is a bit odd, but we’ll see tomorrow when they will separate the engineering, business and science schools.

 I’ve put some pictures of the HKUST, so you can have a look at how it’s like out here.