GMMG

Um. We have our own desks, and we don’t really have a cloak bay or any grass and no playgrounds. We bring our bags in an put them beside our desks. All the buildings in the school are brick and some are 5 stories high but mine is 1.

There are lots of trees which you can climb to 2m high up to the line painted on them. Not all of them have lines. My favourite one is one without lines, cause not many other people can get up there.

One of the things that I like the most about the school is the cafeteria, it is fun but it would be funner if I could communicate with my friends using a language. I can communicate with movements. When school ends at 12.25pm (we start at 8am) I take my bag to a tree near the bike stands and leave it there, then I go off and play for twenty minutes. When its time I go to the cafeteria which is something around the size of Grand View, at one end there is metal tubs of hot food and chefs serving. There is Menu 1 and Menu 2. Menu 1 normally has meat in it where as Menu 2 doesn’t (there isn’t any vegan options). When we’ve got our meals we go to the tables which can seat about 10 people each with my friends. I’ve had pumpkin fries and many other things, even dessert!

We have different teachers for different subjects. There even is a sport hall which has ropes and rings hanging from the roof. I climbed up the rope in 5-8 seconds, I’m the fastest in my class.

 

Our first stop from NZ was Hong Kong.

5 highlights of my time in Hong Kong;

1. The Hotel

The hotel was great, we were on the 22 story & the hotel had its very own pool! (which we swam in every day.) Everybody was very kind and every evening a cute thing called the “turn down service” came and gave us new water and asked if we wanted turn down service (which at first we didn’t know what it meant and they couldn’t explain, we later researched it and found out that they wanted to fold over the corner of the sheets and make the bed ready to get into).

2. The MTR (HK railway system)

The MTR was a great system of getting round the city. It had about a thousand trains.

 

Some of the trains didn’t even have drivers, and they sometimes never came above ground level. You never knew if you were going up or down. The best thing about it though is it travelled fast and was very fun and easy to use.

You paid using the Octopus card (see highlight #4). We were on the light green line, Wong Chuk Hang Station.

Around 4.84 million passengers per day use the MTR almost exactly the same number of people as in the whole of New Zealand!

3. Markets

The markets were VERY fun, selling glittery attractive trinkets and they were always full of people.

I could spend endless time there and some of them seem to go on for ever. At the start we couldn’t find any around Hong Kong but once we found one they were everywhere.

There were also food and fruit markets which sold quite a few fruits that I had never seen before.

 

4. Octopus cards

The Octopus cards were basically just paying cards you could use for almost anything.

The kids ones were the red/pink ones and adult ones multi-coloured ones. The things you used them most for were the MTR and the juice vendors on hot sweaty days when you’ve been walking around the city for what felt like hours. They were very fun to use because you scan them and they make a satisfying noise. Mum and Dad charged them up by taking them into the shop and getting the staff to transfer money onto the cards.

5. Local Entertainment

Hong Kong Temples!

The temples in Hong Kong were amazing. Inside the buildings next to the temple there was probably 100 fortune tellers, telling fortunes with sticks, palm readings, face readings and charts. They all had flash little offices inside the building next to the temple.

The Hong Kong gardens!

The Hong Kong gardens had many different things. They had art exhibitions, a hug aviary filled with birds and their poo and best of all there was some amazing monkeys in cages swinging around with delight on tiny ropes. They were beautiful to watch. We also saw some mere cats that were very funny standing on their hind legs with their paws tucked up and twitching their heads about.

The symphony of lights!

The symphony of lights was made up of all the huge skyscrapers of Hong Kong. They would make patterns and lasers into the night using lights and lasers from the rooftops and windows.