11.1.2008

Went to open a local bank account yesterday. There are two banks at my campus and I chose the bigger one, Hang Seng Bank. Getting an account requires a student card and a proof of address from the student halls. The ATMs are different from the ones we have in Finland. In here you can get money without admission if you use the ATMs of your own bank. Because Hang Seng Bank is a member of the HSBC Group I can also use HSBC's ATMs. I don't know how much they charge if I get money from some other bank's ATM, but I rather not find it out by trying that. Other thing that distubs me also is that in here bank cards' PIN numbers are 6 numbers long, 2 numbers longer than in Finland. How on earth can I remember 6 numbers long PIN number!?

Anyways, today was a historic day for me. I had my first lesson today. The second semester starts officially on monday but our lecturer will miss the first two weeks so he decided to keep those lectures today. Unfortunately, he decided to have them on top of the Orientation for exchange students. I went to talk with the professor and he adviced me to skip the orientation... no way:) Even though there is nothing important for me to hear, it still is a chance to see all the exchange students at the same place. So I stayed at the 4-hour lecture for one hour and went to orientation. By the way, before coming here I thought that chinese people are very quiet and respect the teachers in classes. Yeah right... they make more noise than students in Finland do. They speak very loud during the classes and don't really care about the other students. So much for that prejudice.

The orientation was nice. I knew almost all the information they gave us except the one about how long we're allowed to stay here. We can stay in the student halls until june 6th. After that we have to pay extra if there is free rooms we can stay. That changed my plans a bit. It was nice to see most of the exchange students there. Not everyone has come here yet, but majority has. I met some new people there and later in the evening we went to Lan Kwai Fong where there's quite many popular bars.


Can you find me from the crowd?