It's been quite a while since we've written, so we'll quickly update you on what we have been up to. Amanda turned 21 last week, finally! We went out two nights in a row to celebrate - first to ladies night in Wan Chai, then to a Black Light party. It was a lot of fun, but this week we are back to the reality of school. It's midterm time here in HK and we have been busy studying for all of our exams, therefore haven't done anything too exciting.
However, while in class this week we learned that neither of us are "100% proficient" in English (weird, right?). Since most of the students here speak English as a second language, a small percentage of the final grade is based upon English proficiency. Basically, the professors send all of our papers to a grader within the business school who will rank the paper based upon their view of our understanding and competency of the language. We were shocked to receive papers back with deducted points. The points were mostly deducted because of "grammatical errors" that neither of us determined to be errors at all. We then learned that many students don't pass the English proficiency part of the course. Funny enough, on the next assessment we took, the professor had made many grammatical errors! We found ourselves answering the questions using very few complicated words and brief, to the point, sentences. Nonetheless, we may only suffer a few percentage points on our final grade, but we are not happy about it!
We finally booked our flight home this week as well as our post semester travel plans. Our exams end on December 23rd, unfortunately, allowing for no travel time before Christmas. Many students here, to my surprise, will be traveling with friends during the holiday instead of heading back home to see family. We decided that since we are only in Asia once that we will travel as well. First, we will fly to the Philippines with a large group of our German friends for Christmas. Then we will head to Singapore to celebrate New Year's in a big city. Half of our friends will return home and small group of us will go to Malaysia. The rest of our group will leave Malaysia for Thailand, but Amanda and I will head to Cambodia where we will catch a flight home. Coincidentally, as we were booking our flight we realized that the cheapest way was to route through Seoul, Korea - so as an added bonus, we will take our 13 hour layover to see the city since one of my friends is currently teaching English there. (Maybe I should have her give us an English lesson while we are there... :) ) Phew... after our long trip, we will finally be back to the States on January 16th.
This week we will be studying round the clock to prepare for exams in the coming weeks, however will go to a barbecue and kareoke with some friends this weekend. Can't wait to share with you all about it!
Click to see pictures from Amanda's Birthday
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