lunatic bumblebee

Now I’ve been in Hong Kong for about a month and I’ve settled down so far. It’s October, which means that mid-terms are going to control everybody’s life. Students are running around with loads of books, drinking litres of coffee to stay awake or just camping in the library — too bad that the library closes at 11 pm. However, a UST alumni told me that the library is open 24h at the end of the semester. But I’ve to admit that the library here is really amazing. It’s so huge, with many desks and “cubicles” and you’ve got a magnificent sea view from the window seats…it’s like: “Wow, so beautiful ~sigh~…. I want to go to the beach….d’oh back to work!”

Well, although everybody is complaining about studying for exams and working on projects and all these at the same time, they still have some time left to engage for the students societies’ activities. There is every day some event, like a singing contest, magic show or this week it’s the “Glaciers week” (Glaciers is the name of the Undergraduate Hall 3 — a dormitory). They taped the whole university with their banners, but there are still some exchange students who claim they didn’t see anything when they went to classes…..maybe you need some glasses Wouter ><. How can’t someone notice THAT?

It seems that at UST they want you to develop not only your knowledge but also your social involvement. There is a huge number of students societies like sport societies or business societies where you can get in contact with companies. They organize events like BBQs for members only or big festivals everyone can enjoy. Even the university administration is trying to get the students to participate in workshops by bombing them with spammails (at least 7 per day — I get 5 per year at TUM if I’m lucky). But the university concerns about ther students like in the case of one PG student who died recently: The university is trying to collect donations for the parents of the student as they lost their only child and at the same time their financial backup… Here you can see the memorial wall.

Can you imagine to die after only six days from the day you’ve been told that you have a really serious disease? So try to live your life without any regrets.

The most funny course is definitely my language course: “Mandarin Chinese for Non-Chinese Language Background Students”. I’m lucky to have Ms. Han Xuan as teacher. She’s so funny, always trying to make fun of our pronounciation, so that everybody can laugh at everybody and no one has to be scared or be ashamed to speak “Chinese”. Our class has around 20 students — depends on wether they’re in Hong Kong or travelling around Asia — out of these 20 students there are six Germans (excluding me). And the couple Ben & Bastian are the causes of most of the laughs. Not only is their pronounciation horrible, but they always have no idea what the teacher is talking about, furthermore they always ask weird questions like: “Can I also say that in this or that way?”…I wish they could do so in the normal way, but they don’t…

A couple of weeks ago I discovered a very curious thing concerning homework assignments at UST. I have two courses where I’ve to hand in homework assignments. The amount is compared to the amount of homework I got at TUM very small, but that’s not the point. Usually, we have to drop them into boxes standing in the Department of Mathematics — very similar to TUM — but then I got an email telling me to pick up my homework at a specific room. It took me two days to find the room, although I used the roomlocator. The room wasn’t a room but only a corridor with a shelf full of paper (very colourful as everyone here uses society paper sheets), not really divided in different courses. So the result was that I found one of two assingments. I’ll keep looking for my second assignment though. If anyone can figure it out from this picture, please don’t hesitate to contact me =) It’s a single sheet of paper, non-coloured and chequered.

Anh Thu