Been back in HK for a little over a week now. Good times. Haven't really done any work at all. I've been really unmotivated lately. Maybe it's just because I know grades don't matter anymore, though I guess part of it has been that grades (at least for me) have had absolutely no correlation to effort. I've been spending less time on my papers this semester, been able to crank them out in a weekend now, yet I've been getting my best grades ever. Go figure. Which is good in a way, but really bad for motivating me to get off the couch and back in front of a computer.
But back to HK. Well, other than the shopping (which of course is a given) and a spot of running/yoga (though the humid weather is making both things pretty difficult to keep up), there's also the eating. Yeah, it's a hard life. :) I've noticed that I'm a lot less antagonistic towards HK this time. Maybe it's all the running & yoga calming me down. Though I think a lot of it is just me coming to terms that things are done differently here. Not necessarily better or worse, but just different.
I had one of my all-time favourite classes in law school this past semester. It was a visiting professor from the Sorbonne (in Paris) and he was talking about the field of comparative law. Basically, traditional comparative law is all about comparing various countries' legal systems to determine what is the "better law". What he argued though, was that this quest for the "better law" was a fruitless one. What works for one country will not necessarily work for another. What seems strange to one country, does not to another, due to all the history and culture that seep into the development of a country's legal system. Even the comparison of law is flawed, because one has to translate the laws of one country and something will inevitably be lost in translation. That's the very short summary of what the class was about, but I found the whole discussion absolutely fascinating.
I know I've always ranted about HK and despite my recent change in attitude, I will never feel comfortable living here. It's just not what I'm used to. For example, the discrimination laws here don't even protect racial discrimination, leading to examples where schools cut Chinese teachers in favour of Western ones. Only in HK would you blatantly want to discrimate against your own race.
But with the bad, also comes the good. In the morning when I run, I see so many of the elderly out doing tai chi, running, or just exercising. I see young people taking their parents or grandparents out for a stroll. The elderly are respected here and you can see the effects of this on their well-being. Many of them are active and quite healthy. They're not invisible to most of society, like they often are in the West.
There are still aggravating moments, like when I waited to hold the door for someone who was carrying a bunch of stuff, and they blew right thru without so much as a thank you. (Me being me, I yelled "you're welcome" to them in Chinese...my patience only goes so far.) This is a difference in culture, however, and not a matter of right or wrong. If one explores the culture and history of this place, one would probably realize how these attitudes came to be. It's not what I'm comfortable with, but I now understand that difference alone shouldn't give me the right to judge.
