Adventures Abroad: November 2014

For the first month because of my class schedule, I went out (off campus) almost every other day. However, as soon as October came, I had a steady inflow of midterms -- at least once a week for 4 weeks. That being said, each time I was able to go out was much more appreciated...

Dance Class - Infinity Dance Studio
I found a dance studio in Hong Kong that I have gone to a few times now to take classes at. The classes are taught in Cantonese, but the instructors all know English (plus dance is not too difficult to learn in Canto...). It's been really awesome because I've never taken any hip hop dance classes before in a studio setting. It's been my temporary replacement for ReFresH choreo classes...

the door to one of the studios at IDS

one of the classes I took:

Northwestern Events
When the president of Northwestern, Morton Schapiro, came to Hong Kong for an alumni event, he stopped by at HKUST to meet with the president of UST and have lunch. All the Northwestern exchange students (6 of us total) were invited and attended the lunch, which was a 6 or 7 course dim sum meal. It was pretty cool to meet and talk to the president of both universities, but then Morty invited us to eat dinner with him and other NU staff/alumni after the alumni event...so we went to that too. The alumni event itself was more geared toward the "We Will" fundraising campaign, but the dinner was super fancy, classy, and delicious...

Along with the HK protests going on, I described this week to be "too much once-in-a-lifetime happening in my life".

Morty + 6 exchange students!

the table during dinner with Morty (the white hair hehe)

pigeon? it was delicious.

The day afterwards, I represented Northwestern University at UST's engineering school exchange fair, where people came up to ask about what it's like to study abroad at Northwestern and other universities. I was excited to meet one person who was going to go to NU for exchange next winter at the end.

Me and a student who just came back from exchange with NU

Me and my friend from UMich

Happy Birthday!
Christin's birthday was also in October, and I attended her birthday celebrations.

Many of our exchange friends wrote a sign in our home language to put on her dorm wall. Since there was another American exchange student as well, I opted for Chinese.

In Germany, your 25th birthday is a big deal. Your friends collect boxes and string them, and them wrap your house with them. Supposedly, you are supposed to take one drink for every box there, but my roommate was creative and instead put slips of paper inside each box with a challenge/question (like "what's your favorite moment in HK so far", or "hug everyone in the room")

My roommate and I prepping for the celebrations

Chinese Painting Workshops
Emily found a free 2-part workshop at the university on Chinese painting which we went to. It was focused on Xu Bing's style and works (he's really really really cool), and we had a lot of opportunities to try some of his styles.

practicing how to hold the brush

"square word calligraphy" is one type of Chinese character system that Xu Bing invented that combines English letters with Chinese style calligraphy. Can you tell what mine says?

Another style of painting is "landscripts" where Xu Bing wrote the character for the landscape components in his painting. I tried my best...

Stanley
Finally, the first Tuesday of the month I have free (after midterm season), I went to Stanley with some Peacemaker (North Point Alliance Church young adult fellowship) friends. Stanley is known to be a "rich" area where mostly non-Hong Kong natives live, but it is also a major tourist area. I can see why it has a rich-er reputation...the scenery is amazing...