All hope is crushed.

Disclaimer: This blog entry is full of my ranting against the things that aggravate/irritate me here.

Sadly, it turns out the planning for the Macau field trip was simply bad organization rather than assumptions of competence.

My first complaint has to do with the students... I think it's very irresponsible to go out partying the night before you have a class field trip or something like that. There were several students at the trip who had not slept at all, and some who started off the trip by still being drunk from the night before. (2 people were completely late because they forgot their passports and the like.) I find a lot of students here do dumb stuff like this. It aggravates me.

First issues with the trip occured last night. At like 6pm Saturday evening, the TAs sent out an email informing us that they were unable to buy all our tickets for the 9am ferry. Therefore we would be divided into two groups and the one group would leave at 9:45am instead. I don't know why they emailed us Friday evening to tell us this when they had booked the tickets Thursday after class! (8:30am class) Gah.

Mau, being her usual overly punctual self, was the first one to arrive at the ferry terminal. Next rant topic: Punctuality. I'm a believe that if you agree to meet someone at 12:30, you should be there by 12:25. It ensures that you're on time even if you have different times on your watches and the like. I think that in the case of official functions, you should be extra careful with the time - especially if you're running the show. I think half the students had arrived before the prof showed up. (To be fair, the TAs were there after me, but my general state of irritation won't let me forgive anyone for anything right now.)

So we all managed to buy return ferry tickets (remember, I paid the TAs to buy my ticket there, but I was responsible for the ticket back). The lady at the ticket booth tried to charge me for a return ticket. It took several minutes to convince her that no I was not crazy - I only needed a one way ticket from Macau to HK.

The ferry ride itself was amusing. The prof stayed behind at the terminal to wait for the students who were going to catch the 9:45am ferry. I sat next to Jaspar (Netherlands) and he, Christine (Canada) and I yapped about the class and general disappointment. We all agree that the class that shattered our illusions that we might learn something was the silk farming class. It was fun.

As mentioned before, we were relying on public transportation to get around the city. This resulted in about 15 students waiting at a bus stop for 20 minutes while the damned bus came. Part of this waiting game was irritating, but I was also enjoying myself because I got a chance to talk to the TAs who are a lot more interesting than they seem in class.

We moseyed on over to the Taipa market, and thus began the official field trip.

Sadly field trip seems to entail taking us to random locations, and not explaining why we were there. Luckily there were those touristy plaques around we could read. Also, whenever we went somewhere, we weren't given enough time to look at things thoroughly. For example, we went to some historic avenue that was actually kind of interesting, but everytime I turned around, the class had moved on to the next building.

Lunch was amusing. I joined our prof (his group caught up with ours) along with some other students and went to a really good Portugese restaurant. I didn't know pork could be so tender. Conversations were a bit awkward with the random group, but we had a good time nonetheless.

The weird/amusing thing about lunch was the after-food chat. One of the local girls started talking about music and talking about how she likes Rock and folk music. (Is Michael Jackson considered rock? Or ghetto pop?) I don't know how to describe it, but here's an attempt. This girl is really nice and very friendly. However, if we had had this conversation with a person back in North America, I know we would all be thinking, "Oh my gawd, this person has mental issues" or "Oh my gawd, this girl is such a loser." But we couldn't in this situation because she was being completely authentic and just didn't know any better.

The next item on the agenda was the A-Mok Temple and the Maritime Museum, both of which I had gone to before. The only bummer is that we only like half an hour to visit both. I had taken at least an hour at the museum alone when I had been in Macau earlier. I avoided the temple due to the overwhelming clouds of incense and since by that time, we only had 30 minutes left, I decided not to go to the museum either. I just found a chair and proceeded to snooze.

Amusingly before my snooze session, I ran into a museum security guard who remembered me from the last time I was there. (He was the guy who asked if I was half-chinese.) We chatted for a few minutes and when I mentioned I was on a class trip, he assumed I was the prof. Har har har. No.

(Speaking of my prof, do you think it's professional to show up on an official school outing in jeans and an old t-shirt that's been randomly bleached (by accident)? He normally wears dress pants, work shirt to class.)

Off we went to visit the Camoes Museum which was nothing but a very "pretty" building according to my prof. There was apparently an art museum in the bottom floor of the building, but we didn't have time to visit it. Plus the building itself was covered in bamboo scaffolding, so I don't know why we went there. If we wanted to see Portugese architecture, we coulda picked any other building along the street.

Next was a church/cemetary that was actually pretty cool. It was neat reading all these tombstones from like 1825 and the like. I saw one tombstone for a woman who was murdered on a ship.

By this time we were thoroughly discouraged by the trip. The next planned stops were places I had been to before. I finally caved and told the prof that I would grab a taxi and head back to the ferry early. (No, I was not the first student to do this. Several others had also left early.) Christine joined me too. It's 8:16pm as I write this. If I hadn't left early, I'd probably just be getting off the ferry right now. Score!

One of the TAs passed me a copy of the requirements for our field report guide if we chose to write a report on Macau. This report is supposed to be done with our group... The report is only 1000 words!!! We, a 4 person group, are supposed to write that together? WTF??? At first I thought I was misunderstanding the TAs, but they left no doubt that this big field report I've been worrying about is a piece of cake.

Final complaint about the trip? My group didn't show up. I don't think this needs any further explanation as to why that irritates me.

Now I'm home and can sleep. Life is good. Tomorrow is Ocean Park!