CityU Study Abroad Experience

If there was one thing, absolutely a singular objective to commit to in a foreign place, it would be to eat.

Okay, perhaps I shouldn’t be so literal, but food is one of the great ways of experiencing culture in a new place. Whether it’s the difference between New York and Texas or between London and Hong Kong, the food is up there in terms of cultural identity.

And if we’re going to talk about food, we’re going to have to start with rice. As a person of Asian descent myself (culture and all), I get, to some extent, how central and vital rice is to a meal. It is the staple to which all other foods complement, a starch to fill what other foods may not. Whether cooked in its most basic and common form, or cooked with water, as congee (others may call it porridge), or compressed into fun shapes, rice is nearly omnipresent. With a neutral flavor and significant mouthfeel, it’s a great vessel for accompanying most other foods.

So, long story short, expect rice.

But, if you can get congee, I would certainly recommend it. Most congees are very light in flavor, be it chicken or beef or what have you. (I say light as in not as unctuous, not light as in lacking.) It’s effectively like a thick soup, though less heavy than actual thick soup.

But before I go on, I should post a word of warning.

It was to be expected, but be aware that almost everything that is cooked—even those in informal and familial gatherings—will likely contain MSG. MSG, or monosodium glutamate, is that magical ingredient that produces the so-called “umami” flavor. Sometimes it works, like salt, to draw out the best flavors in food.

For me… I was not a big fan of the seasoning. I don’t know whether it can be technically termed a seasoning, but people in Hong Kong effectively use it as such. Sometimes MSG is overbearing, a sort of parallel to oversalted food. At other times, it just doesn’t feel like it should be there. I think the worst application was when I tasted MSG in plain congee; it just had no purpose there other than to muddy up a good bowl of plain congee.

But I digress; food is more than just the extras.

There was dim sum. There was a lot of it. Spring rolls, dumplings, wantons… Buns, chicken feet, cow tripe… Well, some of the things on the menu might not be up to your preferences, but it was worth giving some of them a try. In some restaurants, I could eat only dim sum and be fully sated by the assortment alone.

And then there were times when a good meal—a good, full course meal—was what was needed. In terms of native cuisine, there was plenty to be had. Good old char sui (or however you like to write it—BBQ pork seemed to be the consistent translation) was on every menu—as were salted chicken, noodles, congee, and so on. Some places had better quality than others, but overall it felt like the quality was definitely a step above the stuff I found in New York (sorry, Manhattan Chinatown!).

The canteen pantry had a wider variety of foods to choose from. Catering to the global participants of their university, CityU likewise has a plethora of meals of varying flavors, Eastern, Western, and so on. What sliders? Sure. Fancy some curry? Here you go.

The bowl of curry is actually ovoid. Yay optical illusions!

Chicken, patty and mashed ‘taters. Not bad.

However, the one thing I wanted to do while abroad that was food related was to eat eccentric food. Maybe it was because I spent too much time watching Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern, but odd cuisine that didn’t make me queasy on first sight had a strange allure to it.

So here’s some snake soup. Well, not solely snake; there was some chicken, pork, and other goodies mixed in to mellow out the flavor, since snake meat is apparently fairly bitter. It was great.

Best snake soup this side of Kowloon!

There was also stuff like pig’s blood, frog legs, shark fin soup and turtle jelly. For some of the more controversial foods like the last two, I think the ones I had were some of the faux stuff. The local populace can be finicky about these foods.

In all, I would highly recommend Hong Kong cuisine. If you can get a trusted native (or pseudo-native) to guide you around more out-of-the-way locales and joints where English is not the common tongue, you’ll probably find some of the best noodles and such that Hong Kong has to offer.

Alright, then, let’s get to brass tacks. The main reason we exchange students go abroad is to learn. Well, maybe it’s not the main reason, but it’s certainly the centrality of it all; without the institutions, we wouldn’t be able to cross countries for so long with relative ease. (Relative, of course, being the key term; red tape will definitely vary your results.)

After some sticky bureaucracy caused by the squeeze of the end of the fall semester in Baruch and the beginning of the spring semester in CityU, I ended up taking management, service management, marketing and intermediate microeconomics. It was not a bad roster, though perhaps more minimalistic than I wanted (I did not manage to snag a statistics elective, pity).

I was somewhat fortunate enough to net myself a roughly four-day week of courses. While that might sound nice, it was apparently child’s play compared to some fellow European exchange students. During the orientation week (the week prior to the beginning of classes, and the time for the exchange students to finalize schedules should they want to), some of my fellow exchange students tried to and apparently successfully managed to cram six courses into two days! That seemed like nothing short of sticking an IV full of coffee for those two days; I was more than content with what I had.

An excellent, albeit light, schedule.

The classes consisted of one class of lectures and one class of tutorials per week. As the names imply, the lecture classes were where professors effectively processed the textbook and other notes in audio and visual form, whereas the tutorials allowed students to show their own work. For those who have taken basic accounting in Baruch, think of it like that.

In theory, this would be a fairly good system. It encompasses those who learn by rote as well as those by work. Compared to Baruch’s typical courses, it’s not as flexible, but it covers the bases. Baruch courses tended to be mostly lecture classes, but have the freedom to do hands-on work if need be. That was the tradeoff between Baruch and CityU courses in general.

In actuality… the classes were not as smooth or effective as it seemed.

The lecture classes were, expectedly, one-dimensional in that respect. We went to class, the professors relate textbook material and some examples to us, and we take notes. Sometimes questions were asked, there was a presentation for one class, and some of the classes used exercises to convey concepts. However, with no roster check for lectures (because many of them cleared a hundred students easily), absence rate was fairly high.

The tutorial classes however… did not go as smoothly. For my management class, the tutorials did not match up with the sections taught, so there was a bit of dissonance that grated on me at first. For the intermediate economics class, the attendance rate became gradually and frighteningly low. What began with twenty-thirty students ended up being three attendants by the last tutorial. The marketing tutorial was effectively a multiple-choice worksheet and review, which was adequate in its intents. The service management class did not have a tutorial section because the lecture class was a double-class (much like our three-hour, one-day classes).

Extensive math sometimes involved.

Adequate Q&A, multiple-choice worksheet.

The projects were also a bit of work. The service management one was probably the best, as it was a full-fledged project that encompassed most of the concepts we learned, and it was more or less semester long. I liked the professor; he was quite stern with his evaluation (he made no doubts about that, evident with my first exam score), though he was also very nice and helpful to those who approached him. As for the management and marketing projects… they baffled me in that the marketing project seemed to incorporate concepts of management, while the management project seemed to focus more on marketing (in that it focused a great deal on SWOT analysis). Completing them wasn’t too bad, but the inverted manner in which they were delivered still irks me today.

Now, before I go onto the exam section of this blog, I want to preface with another concept:

Studying. Because of the spacious size of lecture classes and the general lack of homework given, you’re going to want to double down on your studying efforts. The university classes generally run on a midterm-final system, which means your grades are incredibly stacked towards them. It does explain the lack of attendance, though…

But I digress. The point is, cramming is not an option. I do not say that with respect to having experienced cramming for these exams. No, I say that with the perspective that even though I reread my notes repeatedly and scrolled through my textbooks repeatedly over the course of the month prior to the exams, did as much as I could to cover all of the bases that I could, the exams were still quite challenging.

To be fair, it wasn’t that the tests were difficult. I thought that they were fairly challenging, but certainly not impossible; everything was there, I just had to look for it. The problem was that, because of the very formal approach for both the lectures and the tutorials, they were not quite the learning methods I was accustomed to.

And, again, to be fair, in hindsight I don’t think I did poorly in any of the exams (save maybe the service management one). I’m a bit of a completionist when it comes to tests, so when I can’t answer a question (read: absolutely stumped), it can send me into panic mode. And in hindsight, that was probably the stress I felt when I took those exams. I answered most of the questions fine, but when I arrived to that one big one with a blank, it would eat at me for the rest of the time.

Long story short, if you’re good with a midterm-final system, you might be solid in passing these courses with good grades. If not, keep up with the readings, try not to rust on the concepts and you’ll be golden. Either strategy, depending on your style, will give you plenty of time to explore the rest of Hong Kong. Just, for both your sanity and mine, DO NOT CRAM.

One of the greatest little details for me was the octopus card. It was most ironic, since I was (and still am) not too keen on using a credit (or debit) card as a routine tool. And yet this was one of my favorite items from Hong Kong.

For those of you wondering what an octopus card is, don’t worry, it’s not made of real octopus (…I think). The octopus card is very similar to a debit or credit card; it’s a piece of plastic with an RFID tag embedded in it. The only difference is that is doesn’t have a magnetic strip on it whatsoever; with few exceptions, all card-accepting machines are tap-and-go.

And that is a splendid feat indeed. I recall the MTA tried a joint effort with a card company—CitiBank, it might have been—as there were a few of these card-readers situated at specific turnstiles. Needless to say, their removal didn’t exactly herald a new age, since we’re still using metrocards today.

On the other hemisphere, however, the octopus card reigns supreme. It is meant to be a buffer between you and your bank account. It has no identity or track record of its own; just put in money at the local 7-11 to charge the card, and then go shopping. If you lose it, then you’ve lost the money in the card, and that’s about it. The cost of getting a new one is a bit pricey, at $50 HKD, but if you can keep it safe, it’ll be worth dividends. The locals usually put anywhere between $100-500 HKD to last them the day or week.

The octopus card is accepted at a wide variety of places. It can be used in supermarkets, some restaurants (definitely fast food joints), the major transportation systems, certainly around campus…

Though it is meant to be a great convenience—and for the daily routine, it is—it is still important to keep other means of currency on hand. For places that don’t accept octopus cards—usually places that sell expensive products, many restaurants, and places located on the paths less traveled—paper money and credit cards can’t do harm.

I don’t think the octopus card will cover this…

Speaking of paper money, it would be a good time to explain the currency rates. During my stay, the rates hovered around 7.75 HKD to a US dollar. To put it into perspective, here is a given day’s meals: a macaroni or noodle soup breakfast for $12-13 HKD, a lunch at the main canteen or a (strangely inexpensive) McDonald’s meal for $20-23, and a dinner of BBQ pork, eggs and rice, or something else on the menu at the dorm canteen (they rotate the specials) for $20-26. For this total, plus a 1.5-liter bottle of water for $6, would be $68 HKD, conservatively. A 3-meal-a-day set cost less than $10 US.

This decent meal for scarcely $4 US!

Of course, since most of my meals came from the various campus canteens, the sum was quite cheap since they seemed quite discounted. Even so, while the price of food may be higher elsewhere, it was usually not as much as a New York equivalent (except for restaurants emulating Western cuisines, like an Italian restaurant and a Chicago restaurant located in the mall; they seemed to emulate the prices just as well).

I won’t say the same for appliances, however. Though I did not need to shop for quite long for more expensive equipment, I did notice that some of the products were vastly costlier than in America. I was unsure whether this was because these products were more of a luxury to local residents or what have you, but I avoided such appliances unless they were necessary—and even then I tried to be cost-efficient since my stay was temporary.

The moral of the last part is to avoid getting caught in the cheap offers and expensive tastes. Yes, splurge every now and again, go out for a good meal at a restaurant or buy some nice gifts for the return journey, but be aware of not only the price of these things, but also the quality. Despite whatever stereotype there is about China and Hong Kong and quality, even local residents have a keen eye on this matter.

Transportation wasn’t something that comes up very often, which is ironic, given its mundane utility. But it’s that mundane utility that makes me forget that it’s there. Turn on the engine, swipe the metrocard, hold onto the railing, wait for the next stop, and don’t miss the exit. Turn left, turn right, stop at the lights, watch out for cars.

So when I had to take a flight to my new abode for the next six months, I took notice. It wasn’t quite the mundane mode of transportation I was used to; maybe for a traveling spokesperson or a band going on a tour this was normal routine, but for me, it was a bit of a shock. The last time I went on a plane was when I was scarcely learning how to add numbers greater than nine.

There was what I assumed to be the usual procession; saying goodbye to my parents, getting luggage loaded, double-checking all of my documentation, waiting for the flight to arrive (so that I may depart). Security was obviously much greater than my last flight, though I won’t blame others for complaining about red tape dilemmas either. The flight was pleasant; the seat was, for the most part, comfortable, there was plenty of entertainment, and the meals were better than the old adages about airline food.

No, the problem for me was the sixteen hours of flight. Between the shock of going abroad and the prospect of being more or less stuck in my seat for the better part of a day, not to mention my internal clock was going to need recalibrating, it was just agonizing. I’m not much of a heavy sleeper, so I could barely enjoy a few hours of sleep before being shaken awake by the slightest of turbulence (or, more probably, my own shuffling in my seat).

And that was just the flight.

On the ground of Hong Kong, I was constantly shuffled and moved for the better part of two weeks. Most of it was sightseeing and tourism, though other travels were for supplies (and on some days they weren’t mutually exclusive).

I’ll be honest; I don’t travel much. Maybe it’s because my friends are good drivers, or I spend too much time with the subway system, but traveling has often been fairly uneventful.

So when I got on a minibus in Hong Kong, it was… an experience. To preface, Hong Kong’s geography is quite mountainous, even across the archipelago that make up Hong Kong. So when the driver gunned it the instant I settled down, it was a real (literal) jerk to the system. No, I’m not saying the drivers were jerks, I’m saying that it might not be a bad idea to hold onto the handle bars for the duration of the ride (mind the sanitation, of course).

The double-decker buses were a somewhat similar affair. (Interestingly enough, they don’t have many regular sized buses; it’s mostly the minivan-looking minibuses and the gargantuan double-deckers that function as the equivalent of MTA buses here in New York.) Maybe it’s because I haven’t ridden a double-decker in recent memory, but it just felt like the buses were making insane turns with minute radii, and it often stopped uncomfortably close to buses in front of it. If there wasn’t a window, I could touch the bus in front; it was that close.

And then there was the rail system.

I must say, after experiencing New York’s subway system for much of my life, it looked absolutely astonishing. Every station had its own mall either built in or adjacent to it, and that was omitting the multitude of small stores operating just outside the turnstiles. While the small stands near the station mostly sold foods or were 7-11s (and equivalent competition), the malls had everything from electronic stores to supermarkets. That was a great thing indeed, because the City University of Hong Kong had a tunnel that led directly to the Festival Walk mall—and by extension, the Kowloon Tong station.

A map of The Lane, a smaller mall associated with the Hang Hau station.

The stations were spotless; it was about as stark a contrast as I could see from the typical New York fare (sorry, MTA). The trains were fast, incredibly fast; it was understandable, given that stops weren’t allocated every dozen blocks (not to mention some trains had to ferry people between the mainland China part of Hong Kong and the island of Hong Kong itself). Most rail lines ran within two to six minutes of one another, with a mean closer to the shorter time. Delays were absolutely not tolerated; anything that obstructed the system was almost newsworthy. And the ride itself, for going at such a high speed, felt smooth as silk.

The short end to this is: take the bus, take the minibus, take the train, walk if you want. The bus rides are a little more hectic, but if you’ve been in a taxi with an angry driver, it’d probably be about the same. The train will get you to any major hub, but the buses will get you to the hidden gems. Go ahead: get exploring!