CTY Hong Kong - Week 1

Wow - week 1 of CTY Hong Kong is over, and I am exhausted.  It's not the kids or the work, no... it's the lack of vegetables.  This meat and dairy intensive diet has me barely able to function.  Hopefully things change soon.  My co staff are great, really love working with them.  We get along very well, and have become a little family of sorts, bonding over our early nights and finding humor in what we can in every situation.  Everyone has a nice laugh, and we hear it often.  I like this.  We certainly come from many places and different backgrounds, which makes everything more interesting.

One thing I haven't been doing is exploring Hong Kong itself.  I plan to get out for afternoons a bit more this coming week.  So far I went out once to explore, and that's about it.  I also went to shabbat services at the Chabad house which was fantastic.  I met lots of Israeli's (of course, we had some mutual acquaintances) and enjoyed a fabulous meal.  Service was very traditional, not at all like my experience in Munich where I barely recognized much of what went on.

Today, we ran a world fair.  I was placed at a station for France, and for french impressionism (water coloring) we put mustaches on the kids.  I spent all of the early afternoon in the sun (yes I need a shower).  But, taking it in full stride, I shaved to highlight my actual mustache.

Afterwards, we watched high school musical and the kids sang along, which was comical.  At one point, I got up to go find a washroom.  As I walked out, I put up my arms and shrugged my shoulders, unaware that anyone but the other RA I had just said something to was looking in my direction.  The entire theater broke into applause, and unbeknown to me an official break was called.  As I was washing my hands, the bathrooms were stormed.

Other funny things this week were mostly small stuff, pulling aside one of my kids in the elevator so that a woman could exit first, only to discover the kid who I had yanked aside was in fact a student of the university and not mine.