Month: December 2022

I just took my last final this afternoon. While I’m very glad to be done with finals after weeks of stressing over them, I’m starting to feel that the tether tying me to Hong Kong is unravelling as my time here dwindles. My roommate also returned home yesterday. I have five more days here, including today. I’m caught between missing my family and being unready to leave behind Hong Kong, the friends I’ve made here, and all the experiences and things I have known here. I’m not ready to recollect Hong Kong from the United States, to consider it as an experience gone by, knowing that I most likely will never experience anything like this study abroad again.

It’s starting to really feel like winter, as a couple weeks ago the temperature dropped from the upper/mid 70s to the 50s and 60s. With only air-conditioning in my room, I feel like the humid cold has settled into my bones… I’m always bundled in my three to four layers when I leave the dorm halls.

But before I talk too much about that, I’m going to talk about my exams. For one of my classes, I just had a couple projects to finish. For my other classes, I had more or less traditional final exams, although they differed a bit from the type of exams that I’m used to taking back at Linfield.

The Cantonese-speaking final was like the midterm:  we met with the professor and demonstrated our pronunciation ability and that we could respond to simple questions. However, for the written final, it was much more formal than exams I’m used to taking in college. We had a one-hour time slot outside of class time, in a different building than our normal class took place. Additionally, we were assigned a seat number; both classroom and seat number were posted on our school accounts. The environment reminded me of an AP exam, as we had to wait until it was exactly 1  pm to start the exam, and the exam paper had a front cover to fill out with your information.

The final for one of my literature classes was perhaps the most differently-structured exam I took. We had 24 hours outside of class to write our responses to two essay questions. We received the prompts at 6 pm on the first day of the exam, and we had until 6 pm on the next day to submit our responses.

For the next exam, we received four essay questions that we had to respond to in approximately five hundred words. We had five days to write our responses to that exam. I submitted it last night.

Today’s exam really reminded me of an AP exam. It, again, was in person, in a different classroom than the one where we had normal classes, and we were assigned seat numbers. I believe they combined our class (perhaps two different sections of the same class) with another one, as there were two professors proctoring the exam – my professor and one other. When I arrived at the exam room and saw so many people outside that I didn’t recognize, I was originally worried I had gone to the wrong building. Fortunately, that was not the case. I would estimate our class had around 25-ish students, and there were nearly sixty exam booklets set out. We had two hours to write responses to two essay questions. I haven’t had to write an essay in a timed limit since high school, so it was a little bit stressful having to do that again, but it ended up being alright. And now all my exams are over.

Then, my friends and I went out for dinner. 🙂

Until next time,

Kelsi Otto

(11/30/2022)

It has come to the last week of classes. Next Tuesday is my last class, and then the rest of December, until the 22^nd when I depart for home again, is dedicated to finals. No matter my initial uncertainty about studying abroad and being so far away from home and everyone and everything I have ever known, I now find myself very uncertain and melancholy at the thought of returning home, although I’m excited to see my family, friends, and cats.

As a very introverted person, I was concerned about making friends abroad, but I have found amazing friends here, with whom to laugh, to learn about and explore Hong Kong and each other’s cultures, share about our different experiences… It’s a difficult thought of making friends while abroad knowing that, at the end of the semester, everyone will go their separate ways, and that even if one keeps in contact over WhatsApp, that you might never see those friends in person again. But I suppose life takes you that way with people you meet whether or not there is a definite deadline assigned to your relationship. I know I will always treasure the experiences and friends I have made here in Hong Kong.

Change as a person is a hard thing to define as it is something that occurs in slight degrees and shifts, ups and downs, over weeks and months and years. I can’t say with certainty in what ways I have changed this last semester, but I know it has changed my perspective on life in many ways. It has changed my worldview, for one.  There’s something about living on a different continent, some 7,000 miles away from home, interacting constantly with people from different places than you (although I do have a few friends who are from the U.S.), that makes the world seem so much smaller and closer.

I have been fortunate enough to travel abroad prior to coming to Hong Kong, but traveling around for a couple weeks, and mostly to visit historical sites, didn’t give me the same sense of perspective that studying abroad in Hong Kong for over three months as of now, has given me. I remember how I felt looking out the window of the bus to take me to my quarantine hotel on the day I arrived. After midnight, after my 24-ish hours of travel from Portland to Hong Kong, looking out at the lights that we passed, the bridges we passed over, the signs in English and traditional Chinese. The buildings taller than I had ever seen before; the crowdedness;  the markers of a big city; the anxieties of knowing no one and nothing; being handed a bunch of papers after arriving at the quarantine hotel; and being sent to my hotel room for the next three days of quarantine.

Now I see the beauty of the multiplicity of buildings reaching to the sky, the lush green of the trees that are plentiful around Hong Kong, which I wouldn’t have expected in a big city (Hong Kong has more greenery than I’m used to seeing at home).

I have to admit a certain uncertainty about returning home after this experience abroad. And while I plan to enjoy every second I have left in this beautiful city and culture, I’m not sure how to fit who I am now into the place of who and where I was before. This experience has certainly given me a perspective on who I want to be in life, and how to move forward.

Talk to you again soon!

Kelsi