Hong Kong life

When I came to Hong Kong, I had a couple of major curiosities, among other things I wondered how the work environment going to be like as well as how I’m going to fare outside work (i.e. finding friends and in general people to hang out with) and how I’m going to adapt to the local climate.

Being five months into my rotation I’m happy to report that I find people to be very positive and respectful at work. Thing that one notices is that people are in general are a bit quieter and a lot of things get decided after the meetings, face to face, especially true with respect to a larger meetings.

“Face” is in general a very important concept in Asia. The last thing people want to do is to challenge their superior openly which could lead to the loss of face. So one finds majority of Asian people are rather quiet in meetings vs. North Americans who are used to the style of meetings in which if you didn’t speak, your ideas would not likely to be taken into the consideration. As the result, I have to keep reminding myself that I’m in a different environment and people might perceive me as being overly aggressive if I continue with the style that I was used to in Canada.

Hong Kong office composition is roughly 90% Asian and 10% European/North American. Naturally, one of my initial concerns was the fact that I don’t speak either Cantonese or Mandarin and I won’t be able to effectively communicate in the office. Thankfully, it turned out that even though the conversation language for majority of Hong Kongers is Cantonese, everybody in the office is fluent in English. The only problem that I occasionally run into is when I travel somewhere, majority of taxi cab drivers don’t speak a word of English, so you are stuck with either going to the major tourist destination spots and walking from there, or keeping handy a phone number of a person who can translate to Cantonese. The one other downside or upside, depending on how you look at it, is the fact that the office gossip is in Cantonese so it all sounds like gibberish.

Finding friends and people to hang out with didn’t turn out to be a challenge neither. Majority of expats are here are on a 2-3 year secondments so none have an established circle of friends and are quite open to meeting new people. I found the easiest was to meet people in the office or through common interests/activities. I quite enjoy hiking and dancing salsa, so I’ve met a group of people through both of those activities.

Hong Kong is great, like Vegas it’s the city that never sleeps. Any time of day you will find people on the streets of Central. Some bars have people partying till 8am the next morning and a lot of food places stay open through the night. Everything in the city is really close and convenient (i.e. 20 min is considered to be a long commute). The coldest it got so far has been +8C, and people were complaining how cold it was and wearing fur coats and parkas. I mean I can definitely get used to this, after the -30C winters in both Canada and Russia.
As with anything there is couple of negatives to offset some of the positives. The summers here are quite hot and humid, which I hear makes for a moist walk to the office. Pollution is bad and is due to the heavy industry across the border. And finally the city is way too crowded, which could simply mean that I’m not the only one who likes this city.
Cheers,
George