Aneta PERETKO

Student of Flinders University, Australia
Exchange to The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

Every evening at 8pm, a ten minute light-and-sound show illuminates the world’s most spectacular skyline. It was an event I witnessed often, sitting on the rooftop garden of a mall with an array of take-away dim sum from the world’s cheapest Michelin-starred restaurant, charging prices barely above pocket change. Free wifi buzzed in the air as I sipped green tea and skimmed through an invitation to attend a legal forum with internationally-renowned speakers, and when I hopped onto the subway system to get home, I waited no more than two minutes in the spotless, safe underground tube and I paid no more than AUD1.00.

This is life in Hong Kong, the most dichotomous of all world-class cities, where I spent six months as an exchange student in Hong Kong University.

Seeking a suitably dizzying level of escape, I headed to the place where east culture meets west... but it didn’t take long for me to discover the union of Chinese and English influence is just one or a series of contradictions that co-exist in Hong Kong.

There is a Hong Kong of bright lights and manicured beaches; of chic glamour that oozes from the city’s skyscrapers, of which there are about three times as many as in New York; of swilling glasses half-filled with aged scotch in Ozone (the world’s highest bar); of expats who emulate transience. But, that Hong Kong co-exists with a worn-out Hong Kong, where touts offer fake Chanel watches, where beggars illustrate the city’s dire income inequality, where a fine layer of smog persistently refuses to leave the air. And within these two Hong Kongs, if you wander into the right elevator of an unmarked office building and press 13/F, you’ll find mouth-watering regional cuisine; if you stray a few blocks away from a major shopping district and into the residential neighbourhood nearby, you’ll stumble upon a liquid nitrogen ice-cream parlour; and if you push on the right plank of wall in the right bar, you’ll enter a secret cigar room. All three of these Hong Kongs, and many others in between, were my playground.

Academically, Hong Kong offered unparalleled opportunities with its renowned lecturers, symposiums, debates and conferences, and connections in Asia, the home to almost all of Australia’s most important international partners. And as though that was somehow insufficient, Hong Kong’s ideal location and abundance of holidays and long weekends meant that visits to Macau, China, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, South Korea and Japan were a fingertip away, journeys taken with fellow exchange students who I barely knew to begin with; but now, I can more or less finish their sentences.

Sure, the oxygen is a little murky, and everywhere is always crowded, but there’s no such thing as a perfect city. International citizens flock to Hong Kong, the bustling, dazzling megapolis with so many dimensions, because despite its flaws, there is no time for anxiety, and no need; Hong Kong is a place where you can have it all.

© Copyright 2018 CK Group. All rights reserved.