Modest Living

Typically, a jackhmmer is not my preferred cause of waking up, but it got the job done the first day of school at 7AM. My only class of the day was Soccer, which I will probably drop (cuz it’s the only class on Monday) and replace it with Tai-Chi. Monday was a day full of walking and returning paper work, which I have to complete tomorrow at the US Consulate. Today, Tuesday was more interesting. My friend John Newman, I’ll get a description of him later as well, and I are in the same Chinese Art Studio class at a separate campus for “Visual Arts”. We got to a late start (had to sign up for a international field trip this Saturday) but it didn’t matter because the teacher never showed up to class. We wondered how long we had to wait (American students would wait a solid 8 minutes and then leave, but this is HK). The separate campus is pretty nice and “artsy” but we went to FestivalWalk and shared some breakfast (I had a chocolate Danish croissant and the best Fugi apple ever…life is tough ><)
John is pretty much legit and has some huge plans for the Chinese New Year, but I can’t reveal them until I am set to join him, but it would change both our lives, so it might be worth the money. But today I had “Intro to Mandarin” which was hilarious. It’s this woman named Liu who practically gave us an anatomy lesson on the oral cavity, using her hands to show how the tongue is supposed to be arranged. Needless to say, we Americans got rocked. Starting with tones is pretty rough, but I could see some improvement in the next 5 months. Tonight: some local girls with John and my roommate (that isn’t meant to sound sketch ><)

Photo: Living in Hong Kong (as I have seen it so far, so I could be totally wrong) is very different than good ole Germantown or Homewood. Shoot, it’s different than major cities in America. First of all, it’s not only the trend to build up, but also to keep the apartment for a lifetime. Hong Kong is so limited in space that the housing available is very (I don’t want to say expensive) valuable. It’s home. It’s an urban resting place. It’s the room(s) where you relax and sleep. John told me that it isn’t uncommon to see a trashy/shack-like apartment that is very up to scale on the inside. I just wonder about these monotone condos, each of them being home to a face or a family.