CUHK campus

The Chinese University of Hong Kong, my new home, is a totally beautiful campus. It's near the town of Shatin in the New Territories, north of Kowloon and Hong Kong island. It's not super convenient to get downtown, but the views, space and cleaner air on campus make all worthwhile. But the main feature of the campus is the hill. The campus is basically a big hill, with three levels of buildings. I live and will teach on the top level. But the train station is on the bottom level, the English department and the main administrative buildings are on the central level. How do you get around campus? The bus, of course. Every 20 minutes. The campus reminds me in scope and feel of the Stanford campus. I've been so spoiled at Yale--no Koffee Too? right outside my door anymore!
The Central Plaza viewed from the upper level. Quite steep. I'm going to have quads of steel if I walk much on this campus:















One of my favorite buildings on campus, because it has a yellow tower and inside that yellow tower is an elevator. I heart elevators.



















The view from Friendship Lodge. Nice view, right? Next year I'll see this from my bedroom window. Life is good at CUHK.

Liz is here!

Liz took a break from visiting Andrew in Beijing and came down toHong Kong! It's been a great weekend enjoying Hong Kong with the girls. We may have already visited the Esprit outlet in TST twice.
We had a huge dim sum lunch in Central and took the Star Ferry back to TST:

We had a great dinner in Central before checking out the intense bar/clubing scene in Lan Kwai Fong. We sat outside for drinks and enjoyed the people watching:

On Sunday wee went to Repulse Bay to the beach. It was 36 degrees out, so we didn't lay out very long:

Languages

I started learning Cantonese two days ago. Actually learning might overstate it. I've spent three hours each of those days chanting meaningless sounds at various different tones. 6 of them, to be exact.
But day 2 brought something truly new. My teacher gave me my name. My Chinese name. It occurs to me that it's very strange that a man who saw me in a 15 person class for three hours would feel qualified to name me. It also occurs to me that I can't write my own name. He wrote out the characters for me, but I have no idea how to correctly reproduce them. But it's a beautiful name. Romanized (according to the Yale System, of course . . . that school is all of the place here): Fuh (for my last name--close enough, right?), Meihyan (the first character means beauty and the second character means grace; kindness).
On the flip side of not being able to write my own name, I was riding the KCR the other day when understanding English became a stumbling block. The woman sitting across from me was wearing a white t-shirt with pink letters that read: Save the apartheid boycott of the lesbian Nazi lettuce growers for Jesus of the nuclear whales. What?! Ok, I know that it's cool at home to have Chinese characters written on things and we have no idea what they say, nor do we really care. And the reverse is certainly true. But who would write that on a shirt? Someone who spoke reasonably good English (as many people do here) had to have written that shirt and decided it was a good idea. Is it offensive or just nonsense? I still haven't decided.

My Room!

My bedroom:


The kitchen:

The dining room/living room (the views from these windows are amazing! They look out on a beautiful harbor, but it's raining right now)

The first days

I arrived in Hong Kong on Wednesday evening and was met by Dr. Man, the secretary of New Asia College (ie, he's in charge) and Rachel (one of the second year fellows). We met Sam (the other second year fellow) and Una and Dr. Man took us to the Jockey Club for dinner. Not bad for my first evening in Hong Kong.
Rachel took Una and me around campus Thursday morning and I got my first tast of bureaucracy in action. We stopped by the English department where we were told we needed to go to Personnel. Personnel told us that they needed a memo from the English department as proof that we had arrived (you mean me standing here asking you about it isn't proof that I've arrived?!). So now we wait for the English department to send the memo, so Personnel can get us staff numbers and send them to the English department. Then we can pick them up and go get CUHK staff cards. Phew.
I trekked to Ikea and the grocery store in Shatin (two KCR stops down from us) on Thursday afternoon. Ikea was a bit of a blur, but I managed to get sheets, towels, hangers, etc. Some I carried home, but the rest will be delivered to the flat on Sunday evening. The grocery store was an adventure. I managed to find it thanks to Una's expert directions. Inside it was packed--I mean, running people over packed. I found many familiar products (Nature Valley bars, 3m wall hooks, etc.) as well as some ingredients I want to try.