It has been a while since I have added to this blog. I guess that reflects my current state of busy -ness. Let me survey the last few weeks, since we got back from Korea.
Korea was followed relatively quickly with a trip to Zhuhai. Zhuhai is to Macau what Shenzhen is to Hong Kong, i.e. a city just adjacent to a Special Administrative Region, where economic incentives facilitate rapid growth. However, Macau is not Hong Kong and so Zhuhai has not developed to the same extent as Shenzhen. Maybe at least in part because of that, the PRC government is trying to make it into a center for higher education, establishing branch campuses for several universities. Hence United International College, which bizarrely is a partnership between Honk Kong Baptist University and Beijing Normal University. Christianity and communism combined! However, the HKBU part is dominant and really all that BNU does is to enable HKBU to set up shop in mainland China.
We were at UIC to help with a liberal studies conference/workshop that also involved a number of people from a consortium of Minnesotan Private Colleges. I was particularly impressed with the President of Saint Scholastica in Duluth, who gave a couple of talks with excellent and thought-provoking content.
It was a much more Chinese environment than the more international Hong Kong. Such things are most noticeable for me when it comes to breakfast. Any number of savory dishes - congee (savory rice porridge), noodles, steamed buns of various types, meat and vegetable dishes. One evening we went into town, but UIC provided us with student guides, to take account of language issues and to make sure we did not get lost. Elizabeth and I had a great time with our guide, who unusually was from Hong Kong. We spent the whole evening in a hot pot restaurant, which meant we were given pots of broth, heating on burners at the table, in which we cooked all manner of good stuff.
The provost at UIC has the goal of extending the work we are doing with general and liberal education in Hong Kong to mainland China. Talk about thinking big. Rather overwhelming if you ask me.
So that was a 3-day trip and since then I have helped with workshops at the HK Institute of Education and the HK University of Science and Technology. Plus things have been heating up at PolyU, since I have figured out how to engage with the parts of the university required for me to be effective. In addition I have been working with the General Education Centre here as it plans the transition to a normal academic department. Then the semester is ending so I have had all the usual end of semester stuff with my class.
However, there has still been time for fun stuff, not that the work stuff has not also been fun. There was Thanksgiving in there somewhere, when the Freake/Huebner family cooked. Lacking an oven, we could not host, so we decamped for the afternoon to another Fulbrighter's much larger apartment. Just the afternoon, mind you, because I had to teach in the morning. And the turkey cost the usual weekly food budget.
This past weekend, we had two wonderful outings. The first was to Sai Kung Country Park. It required a 90 minute ferry ride and then close to an hour trek, to get to some fabulous beaches. These beaches came equipped with cafes, which suited me, and big waves, which the surfers enjoyed. Then yesterday we went to one of the HK islands called Cheung Chau. It was just like putting down into a Chinese version of a Mediterranean village. A little bigger and more crowded but a wonderful place to be. You can buy fish in the market and take it to the restaurants to be cooked. And just half an hour by the fast ferry from downtown HK. Not a bad place to live!
By the way, I am not sure what photos I am going to put up with this narrative. My designated photographers, Jacob and Duncan were off in Sichuan on the Habitat for Humanity. They had a wonderful time there and are now adept bricklayers.