Gong Hei Fat Choy!!!
Or, Happy New Year! While my friends are on vacation in New Orleans celebrating Mardi Gras, here I am surrounded by tons of people, watching world class parades and seeing dancing dragons and Olympic teams in the year of the pig!
It’s been a pretty eventful weekend. Friday I walked with a friend to get some Indian food. I snapped some pics along the way. Lingnan is out in the New Territories, which is far from the "big city,” yet still is incredibly developed and full of people. The scenery is great and I can hike all around to incredible beaches and national parks, and the town can rival any big city.
These lanterns are everywhere for the new year.
Later, that night I went down to the flower markets. Literally everyone and their mom goes out and buys fresh flowers for their houses for New Years. The streets are lined with flowers and tons of people shouting and trying to sell you ridiculously useless things, like blow up alarm clocks and flashing pig hats.
It was definitely a spectacle. I went with some local friends who got me to try squid and these weird sweet/bitter/salty/fruity dried plum things, Yum!
Today, I was finally able to go to a popular pasttime here in Hong Kong, Football (or soccer.) The Lunar New Year Cup was held today. We watched the Australian, Jamaican, Chinese, and Hong Kong Olympic teams play.
Also, I’m pretty sure I found the only Rastafarian in Hong Kong, or at least the most dedicated. While thousands of people were cheering on Hong Kong this guy was in full support of the Jamaican team!
As I finally sit and take things in I realize that I'm really getting into the groove here. Its so cool when I meet new people and say "Yes, I’m a local." I guess it never really struck me how much I need to seize the day until now. Studying abroad is teaching me that wherever I am, whoever I am with, I still go to bed and wake up with myself. True living has to come from within. I think I'm the kind of person who tends to step back in crowds. I never realized until now how much I look to other people instead of looking to myself. Now here I am, literally as far away as possible from the one place I have spent 20 years of my life, and I feel like this is just the beginning of the me I always knew I was inside. I need to get on a soapbox for a second and put the word out there. STUDY ABROAD. No excuses, seriously. I come from a background of no money, I’m not surrounded by world travelers, and I don’t have any super rich uncles or anything. Yet here I am living in one of the top cities in the world and spending my breaks hopping all around Southeast Asia! I feel that especially for American students, not enough is known about the opportunities available to them as far as studying abroad. Also, even if they know about these oppertunities, it’s been my experience that students are either too scared or too lazy to take them.
That’s another thing I’ve really been hit with lately, how incredibly lazy my past has been in relation to the world. For instance, I was riding the subway today and a precious little girl and her mom sat down next to me. She waved and began to talk to me in English. Then her dad asked her a question in Cantonese and she responded, later on she was watching the news, which was playing in Mandarin, and pointed and said something about it. This girl could not have been older than 2, yet she spoke three languages as a matter of course. It just struck me how that would never happen in America, yet here it's just a fact of life. It really makes me want to try and inspire as many of my fellow students and anyone that I can to take the plunge, travel, learn another language, STUDY ABROAD!
On that note, I’m here in Hong Kong partly to study the schools here. I start helping at a school soon as an English tutor and I’m so excited. My dream is to one day own a multi-lingual school like the ones here in Hong Kong. A very important detail of why I’m here is that I’m blogging as part of my Gilman and Freeman Asia scholarships. These scholarships are available to all U.S. undergraduate students. The Gilman is especially aimed at students on Pell Grants with no previous experience abroad. Freeman Asia is founded out of motivation to send more American students to Asia as opposed to Europe or Australia to study abroad. Through these scholarships I'm getting to start my lifelong dreams. I encourage anyone and everyone to apply to study abroad and for these and other scholarships. There is so much money available for students committed and open to study abroad, seriously all it takes is a gung ho attitude and good essay writing skills. Lack of money should NEVER be an excuse for not getting out there.
On that note I leave you with a challenge, get online and research studying abroad and study abroad scholarships. Talk to Sue Callaway - director of Intercultural affairs at Centenary. If you are a Centenary student, or on Centenary's campus, stop by the Office of Intercultural Affairs and take a look around. You won’t regret it!
