I finished up my cultural extravaganza this week with a concert at the Hong Kong Sinfonietta. Their pieces included a world premier of a work for Nintendo Gameboy, Electronics, and Orchestra, Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1, Lutoslawski's Dance Pieces for Clarinet and Orchestra, and Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. Overall the concert was pretty good. The orchestra was small but powerful, but it was still different than the big sounds of the CSO I am used to. The Nintendo piece was tamer than I expected. There was some interesting moments of dialogue between the orcehstra and the electronics, but ultimately I kind of wanted something more...especially given the experience I have had playing world premiers in Wind Ensemble. The composer (a Hong Konger who is now a post-doc at princeton), came out in an orange prison suit and talked a little about the piece and then took his place in the back of the orchestra with all his "toys" (literally!). The rest of the concert was good, especially the Bartok. The soloist of the Chopin (Sergio Teimpo) was pretty virtuosic, and I even got his autograph! He's still young, but maybe it will be worth millions someday.
I also went on a walk in the Causeway Bay area. You can see some of the pictures in the last album I posted. I guess some of the coolest things on this walk were the temples. In Hong Kong, there seem to be random temples in the middle of the city. In the midst of all the high rises and modernity, you turn the corner and there is this tiny little temple. Because they are so small, it is kind of hard to breath because of all the incense. One of the temples had coils of incense hanging from the ceiling that burn for 2 weeks!
This past Saturday, I went up to Sha Tin in the New Territories to see the temple with 10,000 buddhas. Out of all the places I have been to so far, this one was the only one I struggled to find. Throughout Hong Kong, virtually every street corner and MTR exit are clearly labeled with the directions to attractions near bye. For this temple, I would have had no idea how to find it had I not been to Sha Tin before on an ikea run and saw a sign. Still, we got a little lost and ended up walking through a cemetery-ish complex that we thought was the temple before we got found the path to the actual temple. Walking through the cemetary, lots of people were giving us weird glances and when we got to the top of the cemetary and saw all these gold buddha figurines on another hill, we figured we were in the wrong place.
The actual temple was pretty cool. The steep and winding path leading up to it was lined on both sides with life size, gold buddhas, each one being different. That was cool, until we got to the temple itself. It was a large room where the walls were filled floor to ceiling with little buddhas, again every one of them being slightly different. I read that there are actually more like 13,000 buddhas in this room alone, plus all the life size ones....a whole lot of buddhas! There were even more buddhas around the temple, plus a cool red pagoda.
Also this week, HKUST hosted an exchange fair where exchange in students and former exchange out students for each school had a booth in the academic concourse. It was especially fun to talk to students who were at Cornell last semester and hearing about their experiences and reminiscing. They all agreed that Cornell was much harder than HKUST. So that makes me feel better about not doing so much work here (and about all the work I deal with at Cornell). I also met some of the students who will be going to Cornell next year.
So now I've officially been here a month. I can't believe it is March already. Before I know it, I will be on the plane back to Chicago! There is still so much I want to explore. I'm going on a trip to Taiwan this upcoming weekend. Hopefully some more traveling in SE asia will happen soon, but I really want to spend a lot of time getting to know Hong Kong.
View the pictures from this adventure on facebook!
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