Exchange Diary (CityU Students)

Monday, 9 February 2009

The public transport is convenient as it reaches every district extensively, we only need to buy a pass to take all public transport. When we walk around in the city we explored some of the historical buildings and then we went to a megastore inside a shopping mall and I wish there is such a big and cheap supermarket in Hong Kong.

Tonight we started our real exchange life by playing hard! The buddy club has organized a karaoke party for all exchange students and finally we got a chance to meet everybody. I always thought Karaoke is something unique in Hong Kong or in Asia, but there it is! Although there aren’t any music video for each song, but the way it works is that people write the name of the songs they want to sing on a piece of paper and hand it to the DJ, so the DJ will open the file from a large bundle of songs in her computer and everybody looked at the screen of lyrics and sing out loud. So we drank and sang and sometimes even danced together on the dance floor! Although I’m tired, but it’s just so much fun!



Tuesday, 10 February 2009

Today is the first time for us to take the metro, which is the underground in Warsaw. There is only one route in Warsaw and so it’s pretty easy for us to go to the places we want. So we took the metro towards the very end of the route, Kabaty as we heard there’s a super big supermarket so we went to shop for necessities. Many students here always like to go to this supermarket as it’s really big and cheap. This big supermarket, Tesco is really big and we have a wide choice even for a single category of product. The ice-cream sold is really cheap and delicious too! It costs only 1.7 Zloty, which is around 3 Hong Kong dollars but the quality is much better and there are such a wide choices of icecream!When we today come back to our dormitory, Sabinki, which is for exchange students, we started to meet some more newcomers and it’s so nice to see so many people from different countries gathering around. I really look forward to enjoy this exchange journey!



Wednesday, 11 February 2009

Today is the first official orientation day and we starts to meet the school officers and professors. It’s the first time we have some kind of lectures here. We learnt something about the history, geography and economy of Poland. Then we took a tour around the school buildings and some of the buildings are situated across different street in between shops, residential buildings and parks. Our school is over 100 years old so the building is pretty classic, in the beautiful European way. The way their libraries works in quite a systematic way and everybody are assigned a seat before entering it and it was really very quiet there!

Then we finally got our student ID card and the school has given us a mobile phone SIM card and an information pack.After the orientation, some friends and I went to the city centre to take a little walk around. And we got a chance to chat and learn more about each other’s cultures like different kinds of naming in families. It’s interesting to know for Germans, they can choose to have a family name following the mother’s, instead of following the father’s like what we do for Chinese.


Thursday, 12 February 2009

It’s another day of orientation. Today we mainly focus on the academic issues. It’s funny to learn that in this school there’s a tradition called “Academic Quarter”. It’s just so surprising to learn that if we are late for class within 15 minutes, it means nothing to the Professor. After the first 15 minutes, then it means you are really late. Besides, if the professor does not show up in the first half hour, it means the class is cancelled and we should go back to our places automatically.

And my roommate has finally arrived! She’s from South Korea, called Hyo-Jin. It’s so nice to have her as my roommate as she is a very kind and caring girl. Other than her, there are a few more Korean students coming to exchange in SGH too. At night, the five of us, students from Hong Kong and Korean cooperated with each other and made the dinner together. We were so happy in the dinner as we are talking about all sorts of things. We also had some kind of language exchanges, I know a few sentences of Korean and they have also learnt a few Mandarin sentences in the past too!



Friday, 13 February 2009

Today the school has organized a bus tour to Warsaw for us. We went to the Royal Lazienki Park, the Ghetto Square and my long-awaited Old Town. As it started snowing in the morning, when we went to the Royal Lazienki Park, the scenery is even more beautiful as most of the upper surface is covered by snow! Part of the surface of the lake is covered by snow, some of the ducks were swimming in the water and some were just standing or resting on the ice. They looked so funny. I’m so amazed by how the Polish retain all their historical monuments, especially the Old Town. Warsaw is almost completely destroyed after the second world war and all these “old” buildings are all newly rebuilt according to their original outlook. I think it is kind of action that they are showing respect to the history of the Country. I think if these buildings are rebuilt into new modern skyscrapers, the history will completely lost, there will not be any meaning and there will not be any famous old town or tourists spots. There will only be an empty soul in this city. This problem is really worth thinking especially in the case in Hong Kong.

Labels: 2008/2009 Semester B