Hong Kong, my love!
I am still in China at the moment. I've been in mainland mostly, but I flew to Hong Kong from mainland on the 16th and just got back yesterday. I was there to visit my bf as his family lives there and he also lives there during the holidays. Oh holy cow, how I loved HK! I have already decided that I want to work as a doctor in HK in the future. I have also neeearly convinced my bf to purchase a house for me on one of HK's many hill tops overlooking the sea and city.
My first impression of HK as the plane approached the airport in the air was that it is such a beautiful, breath-taking city with grassy hills and sparkling sea. I had imagined it to be a completely urban metropolitan place where people had lost the concept of nature, but oh how effing wrong I was! There is a lot of green throughout the city (except the most urban and developed areas), and the best thing is that the nature is approachable, and thus provides a choice for its citizens-city or nature.
I went through one of the most nerve-wracking experience during my trip in HK: I met the bf's family. Within my very first hour in HK, I had already met his mum. We had lunch in a high class Japanese restaurant, and I felt very out of place with my plaid shirt and baggy trousers (those trousers are very comfortable for plane trips!). The meeting proceeded quite alright, and I didn't die of nervosity like I thought I would. I also met my bf's older brother and his wife a few days later. We had dinner in an even higher class restaurant and my attire was even more inappropriate as we had just been hill climbing.
The first day I arrived in HK, I walked around a part of the city by myself for a few hours, because the bf had to run an errand. The weather was indecisive, it was sunny, then suddenly stormy and rainy. I had never seen such rain in my life before, it was even heavier than as if someone stood in the sky with a shower head aimed at HK on full power. However, I managed to snap a few photos in between the rain periods:
Skyline with rain clouds
By the harbour in the district I walked in, there was something called Avenue of Stars, where I suppose famous people from HK inprint their hand prints and sign their names on the concrete ground. I saw Jackie Chan's star, and he was the only person I knew (well, Bruce Lee was there too, but his star was too crowded so I couldn't be bothered to look at it).
I shall write about my remaining days later, gotta go exercise!
My first impression of HK as the plane approached the airport in the air was that it is such a beautiful, breath-taking city with grassy hills and sparkling sea. I had imagined it to be a completely urban metropolitan place where people had lost the concept of nature, but oh how effing wrong I was! There is a lot of green throughout the city (except the most urban and developed areas), and the best thing is that the nature is approachable, and thus provides a choice for its citizens-city or nature.
I went through one of the most nerve-wracking experience during my trip in HK: I met the bf's family. Within my very first hour in HK, I had already met his mum. We had lunch in a high class Japanese restaurant, and I felt very out of place with my plaid shirt and baggy trousers (those trousers are very comfortable for plane trips!). The meeting proceeded quite alright, and I didn't die of nervosity like I thought I would. I also met my bf's older brother and his wife a few days later. We had dinner in an even higher class restaurant and my attire was even more inappropriate as we had just been hill climbing.
The first day I arrived in HK, I walked around a part of the city by myself for a few hours, because the bf had to run an errand. The weather was indecisive, it was sunny, then suddenly stormy and rainy. I had never seen such rain in my life before, it was even heavier than as if someone stood in the sky with a shower head aimed at HK on full power. However, I managed to snap a few photos in between the rain periods:
Skyline with rain clouds
By the harbour in the district I walked in, there was something called Avenue of Stars, where I suppose famous people from HK inprint their hand prints and sign their names on the concrete ground. I saw Jackie Chan's star, and he was the only person I knew (well, Bruce Lee was there too, but his star was too crowded so I couldn't be bothered to look at it).
I shall write about my remaining days later, gotta go exercise!
Philosophical Musing #8
I have never sweated so much in my entire life until these past few days. I don't know if I was just lazy the previous times I came to China and just didn't move around much, or if the temperature here has risen like crazy, but I am sticky with sweat almost all day everday! Yesterday, the rain fooled everyone. When it rains, it usually decreses the temperature and brings some lovely wind, but yesterday's rain brough moisture and heat, which resulted in entirely sweated through T-shirts.
Anyway, what I really wanted to write about was how easy our lives are compared to our parents' or our grandparents' and previous generations'. My mum and grandma were chatting, and I can't remember how they got into the topic, but my grandma started reminiscing about the hardships in her life. Her mother died when she was still a kid, and she and her siblings were so poor that they had to beg for food in order to survive. She started working as a teacher for small children when she was 14 years old to earn some money, which was not enough for most things. During winter she only had one shirt and one thin jacket, and she got wounds due to the bitter cold and wind, which ultimately resulted in scars that are still visible. When she was nine months pregnant, she had to ground wheat into flour with that mill thingy. I don't know what the verb is, but she had to push this lever around to ground flour, a job usually assigned to donkeys. The same afternoon she went into labour. Can you imagine what that must have been like? She had no choice, they needed to eat.
What about our lives? We have a surplus of food and clothes and money. We hardly need to do any household work unless we've moved out (well, even in that scenario, we can escape housework if we can survive in our own mess). For most children, their parents live a longer life. Recent technological advancements have made certain aspects of our lives easier. We have so many more choices, we can choose what to study in university, and we certainly have much more opportunities in life. For instance, I had the opportunity to take a gap year, well, two actually, and experience another country and meet new people.
It's so not fair to my parents or my grandparents that they had such hard lives, and I can't even describe how guilty I feel when I look at my life and compare it to what they had at my age. It really makes me cringe with embarrassment when I look back in retrospect at my teenage years complaining and arguing like it's the end of the world about the fact that I wasn't allowed to use the computer when I wanted to or not allowed to go somewhere with my friends.
Today, almost everything is served to us or very easily attainable, and we don't need to fight half as hard as our previous generations did to survive. Is our generation becoming too spoiled?
P.S. I still haven't taken any photos, so I will stick some photos I took in Sweden of the lovely summer weather, because my blog looks too boring without any photos on my latest posts.
Anyway, what I really wanted to write about was how easy our lives are compared to our parents' or our grandparents' and previous generations'. My mum and grandma were chatting, and I can't remember how they got into the topic, but my grandma started reminiscing about the hardships in her life. Her mother died when she was still a kid, and she and her siblings were so poor that they had to beg for food in order to survive. She started working as a teacher for small children when she was 14 years old to earn some money, which was not enough for most things. During winter she only had one shirt and one thin jacket, and she got wounds due to the bitter cold and wind, which ultimately resulted in scars that are still visible. When she was nine months pregnant, she had to ground wheat into flour with that mill thingy. I don't know what the verb is, but she had to push this lever around to ground flour, a job usually assigned to donkeys. The same afternoon she went into labour. Can you imagine what that must have been like? She had no choice, they needed to eat.
What about our lives? We have a surplus of food and clothes and money. We hardly need to do any household work unless we've moved out (well, even in that scenario, we can escape housework if we can survive in our own mess). For most children, their parents live a longer life. Recent technological advancements have made certain aspects of our lives easier. We have so many more choices, we can choose what to study in university, and we certainly have much more opportunities in life. For instance, I had the opportunity to take a gap year, well, two actually, and experience another country and meet new people.
It's so not fair to my parents or my grandparents that they had such hard lives, and I can't even describe how guilty I feel when I look at my life and compare it to what they had at my age. It really makes me cringe with embarrassment when I look back in retrospect at my teenage years complaining and arguing like it's the end of the world about the fact that I wasn't allowed to use the computer when I wanted to or not allowed to go somewhere with my friends.
Today, almost everything is served to us or very easily attainable, and we don't need to fight half as hard as our previous generations did to survive. Is our generation becoming too spoiled?
P.S. I still haven't taken any photos, so I will stick some photos I took in Sweden of the lovely summer weather, because my blog looks too boring without any photos on my latest posts.
