First Day of the Institute

  Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Monday, July 7, 2008

Today marked the first official day of the institute and a chance to meet the students from Peking University as well as the rest of the Wash U students we hadn't seen yet. We started the day late with a tour of the campus at 11. Apparently, Polytechnic is a rather small university compared to others in Hong Kong, but it feels enormous to me. After seeing the key buildings (i.e. social work department, student union, etc.), we ate lunch at one of the student canteens. It was the usual busy atmosphere of a cafeteria so I just pointed to something that seemed good, and it worked out well. After that, we had some down time until the openning banquet at 6. Actually, the banquet started at 7. At 6 they showed a presentation about how the social workers at Poly U had been involved in helping earthquake victims in Chengdu. They had made several trips there to train teachers at universities in the area to work with trauma victims, especially children. The area most effected by the earthquake is actually a location where one of the minority groups in China live, so cultural barriers had been a challenge. It was interesting to hear that a lot of their intervention approaches to trauma were similar to some of those taught at Wash U.

Keeping in mind that a lot of you are not social workers, I will move on. After dinner I walked around with Jaydee

Me, JD and Keith

(another Wash U student) and several of the students from Peking University. Keith (his English name), from Peking U, had been to Hong Kong before and remembered enough to act as our tourguide, which was fortunate because none of us knew how to navigate Hong Kong. Cantonese is the language spoken in this city, and as the other students from Beijing speak Mandarin, we all tried stumbling through a few Cantonese phrases together. I found out that I the term I thought meant "thank you" was actually "excuse me". One reason that phrasebooks should be taken with a grain of salt (it said that we could use the same term for both phrases).  For the record, I find Mandarin phrases much easier to grasp than Cantonese, especially since there are five tones in Cantonese and it can be hard even for native speakers to tell them apart! That seemed to be the consensus among the students from Beijing as well.

I'm signing off for now. Classes start tomorrow, so it is time to get into study mode.