Food & systems thinking

In the UK, I buy and cook my own food most of the time and I normally get them from supermarkets and some local store near my home. I always choose to buy domestic food that produced from the UK that is because the domestic food here is cheaper than import food and the quality is still good. Import food cost more sipping from overseas and it could cause more pollution and of course it would cause more labor. These issues made the imported food more expensive and it is not sustainable and environmentally friendly. That is why I choose to eat domestic food.

However, when I am in HK, I choose to eat import food. Not only me, but everyone else is doing the same thing. The majority reason is that HK is too small to have its own farmland. The fruit, the meat, and even beverage are all import from other countries. The cost of the food is respectively high compared with the UK.

 

 

Adapting my life in UK

I am an exchanging student from the Education University of Hong Kong and currently study in MMU with other three lovely girls.

The reason why I choose to study in UK is that all the courses are English lecture and it is a perfect opportunity to improve my English skills. My main field in Hong Kong is not about education, however, during the exchanging period we are only able to choose limited classes from education course. So everything here is a new start and to be frank, is a challenge for me. When I took the first lecture called Education and Culture with all the other exchange students, it was actually quite relax. Although all the other students besides us are from Europe, some of them seemed not very familiar with speaking in English nevertheless, I use to think people in Europe can speak fluently English. It feels like we are the same starting line and there is less pressure. The teacher also talks in a slow and clear voice to make sure everybody could follow up with her. And the current theme is to teach kids in stage two and we are Then I have experienced another class with local students which is called Organizational Communication. When I waked into the class for the first time, it just looks like the movie I use to watch and now I joined in the class and become part of the movie. The biggest difference between HK and here is that back in HK, teachers are doing most of talking and what we need to do is taking notes. However, in this class, group discussion is required every lesson and I am doing more talking than writing. This is harder than HK because taking notes is a mindless job but the discussion needs analyzing skill and it drives me to think more and come up with ideas.

Life in UK also different compare with HK. People here are so polite that I could not get used to it at first. ‘Thank you’ and’ Sorry’ are the most frequent words I use every day. They are sorry for standing on the way, they are sorry for letting people to wait… People here are gentle and they really care about other people’s feeling. HK contains lots of people and being a busy city, sometimes when someone bumped into another, they are too busy to walk that they even don’t have one second to say sorry.

All in all, there are many differences between HK and UK, if I could stay here longer, I am happy to discover more.