Weekend getaway to HK and Macau

Hello!

This post is a #throwback. The one good thing in not having lectures after wednesdays are long weekends. And long weekends are excellent traveling opportunities. So in october we waved Singapore goodbye one friday morning and took a flight to Hong Kong. The public transportation is well organized, and cheap! From the airport, we took a local bus to Kowloon (for you who don't know, not the HK island) where our hotel was.

Friday was merely sightseeing and catching up with old friends studying in Hong Kong. We had lunch in a fabulous organic restaurant called Mana - just go there, you'll love it! After our highly healthy meal we wandered around the city center and went to Victoria Peak to take the mandatory tourist pics. It is true, the Hong Kong skyline is beautiful in the night - but Singapore's is pretty during the day too ;). Late evening drinks and we were off to bed, for saturday was going to be all about hiking!

On saturday we ate way too much in the hotel breakfast buffet (who wouldn't?) and hopped on the MTR . Our destination was the Lantau island and -at least we thought so - the big buddha. At Lantau we had to take a local bus to the other side of the island, where we wandered in a little fisherman's village. Seriously, I have no idea what their problem is, but they have an issue with dried fish. And dead fish. And some were barely living! I have to say I didn't quite get the attractive part of the smelly dried fish, but there's gotta be something to it. After we had enough of our chinese experience we started our hike. With extremely good instructions: "Follow to sea shells." Hmm. Ok, got it..? :D Well, it soon came clear to us that big B is not on our hike, but the views were astonishing! Funny to imagine how in one city, there can be so much variety in terms of surroundings. I led our group up some stairs and up to a path going somewhere - I had seriously no idea, and neither did anyone else - but we hoped to find what we were looking for. And so we did, and incredibly beautiful infinity pool in the middle of the mountains! The water was extremely cold, but totally worth it, after our long hike! =)

At some point we started feeling hungry, so we headed pack to the city, got changed and went for italian. The evening continued with a french bar and…

Sunday was a bit more challenging.. :D More sightseeing, avenue of stars and dim sum made our day together with drinks at Ozone. In the evening we left to Macau, the weirdest place I've been so far.

Macau's casinos were full of crazy chinese people gambling throughout the night. The old city was actually quite pretty with the chinese-portuguese mixture, but the city was much more chinese than Hong Kong. I didn't see a single cafeteria in the city, apparently there are some though. On monday we headed back to Hong Kong by boat (costs about 15 euros!) and from there back to Singapore. The mini vacay was well needed, for we had been in Singapore for almost a month without traveling!

NUS course reflection

It's weird how fast time goes during your exchange, even though you kind of knew it will happen. I basically have 2,5 weeks left in Singapore… We had our last lectures on the 15th, so now it's time to do a bit sightseeing in SG. The best thing is to take courses with in class exams or quizzes so that you could start traveling straight away in mid november. Unfortunately I have still two exams coming up, Management and Organization and Asian Business Environments (2nd and 4th of Dec).

As I earlier wrote about the courses ( I study in the business school) it's time to reflect upon them a bit as all deadlines are met. I enrolled to 4 courses in NUS, due to the difficulty of getting desired courses. First, as you arrive here - I am quite sure you don't have all the courses you need or want - you'll need to go threw add/drop period, where you can bid for courses. If you still don't get the courses you want, the last step is to fight with the NUS Staff (ok fighting is a bit of a exaggeration, the staff was extremely helpful and easy to communicate with!). One just has to politely ask them if you could get the course and hope for the best.

The course I got that way was Service Operations Management. I think the most fun part of the course has been the group project, in which we were to choose a singaporean company and analyze their service operations. My group chose 360 Cable-ski park. We interviewed the manager and so on… As the company is about wake boarding, i don't know how much more fun a Uni project can go.. :D Also the professor was hilarious! As the lectures were mandatory, he provided good entertainment value (of course in addition to the educational aspect! ;) ). The course ended with a quiz last week, so I recommend it in terms of quality AND traveling!

Family Business was my favorite course by far. We had to in class exams, basically cases of family businesses. Readings were cases, which we discussed in class (a lot of discussion!). No textbooks. We had several guest lecturers, who are running family businesses in Singapore, which was very much to my liking. In addition we had a group project, where we looked into an asian family business. Of this course, I am totally over with too.

Management and Organization on the other hand still haunts, as my exam is in december. The tutorials of the course were every second week, consisting mostly case analyzation (we were to prepare them beforehand). Asian Business Environments also had weekly tutorials, but the material prepared were articles (ranging from 40 to 60 pages each, yap…). In every course, we had a group project, and in M&O we were to analyze some company from a certain perspective - we had ethics. In Asian Business Environments, on the other hand, the group project was analyzation of a given case. The tutorials of ABE are quite intense, and you'll want to prepare for them, as you can be asked to provide an answer about what some author thinks based on an article.

Funny that school started the 2nd of August with orientation and registration and it's already been over three months since that.

And oh,

NUS ranked top Uni of Asia in the QS World University Rankings ;)

Yes, courses for both undergrad and grad -students! Courses are in english, surprise surprise, and if you study in biz school, you can take courses from the faculty freely.

Next up a bit of Hong Kong and Macau ;)