That moment when you are sitting on the plane at 2am ready to take off but wait an hour and a half for an announcement that tells you your flight is delayed until the next night at 9pm………

Yup, that happened.

Now I’m waiting for time to pass at a Waves coffee house in Richmond, with Allison. We are leaving for the airport at 6pm to check in and hopefully get a better grasp of when our connecting flight from TPE to HKG will be.. 

This past week, my group and I finished a couple more interviews for our video project. Aside from a few times the camera stopped recording, interviews went well and we were able to record a lot of new and different information relevant to our topic. Among these interviews, I found particularly Justin Tse’s ideas stood out as he was able to give insight on activism in Hong Kong. Firstly, we wanted to call Justin Tse for an interview because of his dissertation on the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong, which we thought was relevant to our topic as it concerned activism. He was able to touch on some points about Mainland Chinese in Hong Kong as well. Some of us went to SFU Woodwards for an event called “Everything Will Be” which showed a film about Chinatown and followed up with a panel including Melissa Fong, who we interviewed as well. Fingers crossed that all our footage will be useful towards our project! Our group has changed our topic a few times but now we are focussing our project on foreign investment, and any activism related to it.

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We finally arrived in Taiwan! Now, we’re just chilling in the VIP lounge of China Airlines before the first flight out to HK, at 7:25AM. With my living arrangements confirmed, I can finally relax a bit. I will have one full day at least until our class meets at HKIA on June 1st for our trip to Shanghai. I’m so tired right now I can barely type apoijfdsioajfeiojsaf. Because of our flight delay, Allison and I were compensated with $50USD coupon for duty-free shopping, a $15 meal voucher, and chocolates. I would have probably been happy if they just gave me the chocolates, but yay for coupons! I’m looking forward to going to Hong Kong because I’ll be staying with my best friend who I haven’t seen for a while now!

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Hong Kong is sooooooo humid. I think even more so than Taiwan. Another thing I noticed right away is the skyscrapers. There are SO. many. skyscrapers. The cluster of super tall buildings make me feel so tiny and slightly claustrophobic. My friend was able to point out a lot of public housing in Hong Kong and I was quite surprised, because the buildings did not look like what I expected them to look like. My friend told me that in order to live in those government funded houses, besides certain requirements, you would also need to enter some sort of lottery type of draw. From what I learned in the public housing exhibition that my group attended in Chinatown, it is extremely common for people in Hong Kong to live in public housing and there are plenty in Hong Kong, compared to Vancouver. Actually, my friend’s grandmother lives in one of these buildings and according to my friend, the place is comparable to hers.