Piet in Hong Kong

An Unforgettable Year

All in all, I can greatly recommend my stay – it was an amazing last year. There were many positive experiences I made and a few negative ones as well. As all of these brought me forward, I would not want to miss a single one of them.

Once I was accepted at the University of Hong Kong (HKU), the tough part of preparing for the stay was already over. Although there were some further information and documents needed, the Freiburg International Office was very helpful to make things go smoothly. It really pays off to timely start looking for a place to live in Hong Kong. Rents are incredibly high, which is why most students including myself apply to live in more affordable student dorms. As if rent itself was not high enough already, living costs in Hong Kong can be quite high as well. The HKU campus is really nice. It is located halfway up a hill between countless skyscrapers, with a view over Kowloon’s western front and the sea. The Main Building has a nice colonial architectural style to offer, while the centennial campus was built just a few years ago – modernity and tradition are found very closely to each other in a place as crowded as Hong Kong.

I was generally very satisfied with the courses HKU offered me as exchange student. I could choose from courses offered from at least a dozen of different departments and institutes. As a politics student, the current political tensions over Hong Kong’s status in the world and its relationship to the mainland were extremely exiting to learn about from the city itself. Studying in Hong Kong was great to experience both difficulties and chances of mixing a Hong Kong and mainland Chinese mindset concerning studying style and the intentions behind learning with a Western style university that clearly orientates itself at liberal and humanistic ideas developed in Europe and the United States.

Hong Kong is an immensely interesting construct, somewhere between a city and a state – in general and even more for those interested in contemporary politics. It was a unique experience to experience both richness and tension arising from such situation first hand – be it lecturers asking to have the door closed before they commence talking about their stand on the “Hong Kong issue” or a Hong Kong local joking with his mainland friend at high table dinner because they have difficulties to understand each other’s accents. This sometimes-bizarre situation paired with the (mostly) high quality courses at HKU made it an unforgettable year that I would never want to miss.