Class of 2009
Major: Biology and Biotechnology, PreMed
Project Center: Hong Kong, China
Interactive Qualifying Project: Develop a list of alternative livelihoods re-employ a percentage of Hong Kong’s fishermen to help control over-fishing.
Shannon Brooks
January 21, 2008
Our apartment is on the 25th floor of our building and I have an awesome view of the harbor right from my bed! The weather here is great too with an average of 22 degrees Celsius, (about 70 degrees Fahrenheit), which is a huge difference from New England weather in January. A group of us began exploring our neighborhood and went shopping at the mall down the street for things we forgot. We have to get used to looking to the right first when we go to cross the street, since they drive on the opposite side of the road here. People here drive very fast so we have to be careful not to cross too slowly.
My project team met with our sponsors for the first time. They seem really friendly and excited to get going on the project. The sponsors explained that the majority of our work will be out by the docks! We also went and met with some students from the local Hong Kong Polytechnic University who will be helping us with translating. The student we will be working with is a civil engineering major. He seems really excited to be working with us. After a tour of their beautiful campus, the students took us out to show us the city and brought us out to dinner at one of their favorite local restaurants. It was really interesting because everyone ordered an individual meal and then we all shared with everyone else which is apparently common practice in Hong Kong. We tried a ton of different foods including pigeon! It was a really cool way to start off our stay! We had an interview with one of the government officials to discuss the problem of over-fishing. He was really helpful and gave us a lot of insight. The project seems like it’s going to be pretty tricky because the fishermen are very limited in the skills they possess and can hardly read or write Cantonese, let alone English. It’s going to be difficult to find ways to re-employ the workers using the skills that they already have, so we’ll have to look into re-education options too.
The culture here is such an awesome and unique blend of east and west. There are so many people. In fact, the population of Hong Kong is greater than that of the entire state of Massachusetts! The subway stations are always packed with people regardless of what time of day and sidewalks are extremely crowded. I'm still trying new types of food since there are many different things to eat here. We went to an American restaurant for the Patriots game the other day that was being shown live at 8 am! It was a cool experience, a great game, and fun to see all of the other Americans in Hong Kong gathered together in one place!
We've been having a great time traveling around and have been visiting many of the tourist spots. We visited a few of the islands off the coast too. We went to Lamma Island to start and had a nice “family style” seafood lunch, where everyone shares all of the courses. Then we traveled around to all of the small shops on the island, visited the temple, and hiked around the entire coast of the island. A group of us went by ferry to Cheung Chau Island to go to the beach and hike the island. We found a pirate’s cove in the side of the mountain too and explored the cave! Another day we went by cable car, with an amazing view, to Lantau Island which has the largest Buddha statue in the world...260 steps to the top!
