Exchange Diary (CityU Students)

Hi, I’m Gordon, this is my first dairy for the exchange program. Today is already one month after our arrival. The new term has started 3 weeks, and my exchange fellows and myself settled quite well, we have met many new friends through those orientation programs and classes.

All of us are assigned to live in the dormitory of HEC Montreal, which is our host university. Our room is big, comparing with our CityU dorm, also, it is a single room, I am quite satisfied with the dorm.

Coincidently, I have bought a new cooker today, and i have made my first wrap for my dinner. I made the food by following the recipe of “SUBWAY”, which is a very famous chain food store in North America, and i thought it was very tasty.

Tomorrow I am going to meet and have lunchour buddy in HEC Montreal, i am looking forward to it.

We have followed our schedule today, having lunch with our buddy-Coco. Unfortunately, Cludia and Kathy, who are my fellows from CityU, had class during the lunch time, so they could come and join us.

Meanwhile, I have to mention something special about our buddy, since she is a Hong Kong citizen, and able to speak Cantonese as well, she helps a lot when we first arrived in Montreal.

For the lunch, actually they don’t call it a “lunch”, and they use a word “brunch”instead. According to my buddy's explain, brunch means breakfast and lunch, and she said it is quite common in western culture to have a brunch. Before the brunch, I got a great expectation for this meal; however, actually it was simply just a big breakfast, which was big enough to be a lunch. So the “brunch” is nothing special at all. Since it is week 4 already, different kind of assignments is beginning, and I had my first group meeting today with my news groupmates.

Today is the most busy day for me, as I have 2 classes to attend. It is different from CityU, in HEC Montreal, we won’t separate our course into one lecture and one tutorial session. Instead of it, we have a 3-hour lecture, so it is quite harsh.

After all the classes, I joined a orientation program tonight, which call “cocktail night”. We had gone to several clubs to try different kind of alcoholic drinks. At the beginning, I was afraid I could get drunk easily; but afterward, I proved that I could drink a lot! Besides of drinking, we also played those “club game” with the rest of the exchange students, we shared a lot of games between each other.

Tonight was fun, and I had met many new friends today; but I thought that because of the alcohol, I already felt very sleepy now, so that’s all for today.

After a wild night, my fellows told me that our free pass for some of the prestigious institutions had been activated today, so we decided to go to some museums that we are interested in. Finally, we decided to go to a biosphere museum.

There is so much fun, since this museum is different from a normal one, most of the creatures we have seen is not living in a cage. We could touch and feel it, it helps to understand them. There are three parts in this museum, the first part is about the tropical forest, the second part is about oceans, and the last part is about the South Pole. There are different kind of creatures we have seen today, for example, different kinds of ducks, bats, frogs, and the most cute one, penguin.
Also, since the museum is located next to the former Olympic stadium, we could visit it too. However, Olympic game was held in 1976 in Montreal, so it was 30 years ago and the stadium is a bit old already. I could just said that it still has it features. Then, we had our dinner for finishing our trip.

Today is the last day for me to write this dairy, time passes fast. As I have mentioned yesterday, since our free pass has been activated, and this period is just going to last for a week only, so we have decided to utilize it. And, today we used it again, we had gone to a garden with an insect museum. This garden is so big, I don’t think we could walk through of the themes in a day, so we have just chosen two main themes to take a look.

First of all, we went to the insect museum. I don’t want to mention it so much, since it is quite disgusting. Then we went to the Japan theme garden, and this is fantastic. No matter which angle for us to look at it, it is just beautiful. There is a small waterfall in it, and a river and some Japanese houses in it, make the whole garden full of Japan’s tincture. And then we go to the China Garden. Since it is quite near to our mid-autumn festival, so they are holding a lantern exhibition here. It is quite fancy about their lanterns. But it is still ok.