Back to the land of cold and ice

It's literally 5 more sleeps until our flight back to Toronto. After having arrived in Hong Kong in February 2009, it's time to go "home" and visit friends and family, but most importantly, to update our various ID and health cards. Just kidding but really not.

Whilst I can't wait to go back to Toronto, I am dreading the flight back home. We are flying 10:45am on Saturday 3 December. Not the best time to fly for anyone, let alone two kids under 6. Not sure what our strategy would be...would it be a) keep them up all night the night before b) keep to our regular sleeping schedule and just make sure that we are prepared for the flight with games, toys, movies c) drug them. Just kidding about c), maybe just a little bit of whiskey mixed with orange juice.

After being in mainland China where the car seems to rule just like in Canada, I'm not sure if I would get freaked out when I return. In Hong Kong, there are more pedestrians and mass transit users than cars so the first two kind of rule. When I return to Canada, I'm not sure if I would be able to handle so many cars, so long distances between places, and if I would be able to drive after not having driven for almost 3 years. Not to mention also that in HK, they drive on the "wrong" side of the road (e.g. like in the UK and South Africa).

But I will certainly enjoy and relish the space. The space to walk, the space in which to live, and just a general sense of having space and not having to bump into someone or have someone cut you off because there is no space. However, I have also gotten used to having so little space, I might not know how to deal with big spaces like my parents' house or those of my friends. Living in a convenient and efficient living space has proved to me that a family of four does not need much more than 1,200 sq ft of space. This, however, is contingent on having accessible and conveniently placed shared facilities like swimming pools, gym, playgrounds, bike and car parks, grocery stores, etc. Without a good infrastructure, living in a tight community like the one we live in HK will not work and people will get irritated.

The girls have said that they don't miss anything about Canada except the snow so we hope that there will be some. Here we come (back)!

Shopping for Primary Schools

It's amazing, sometimes I feel like we just moved to Hong Kong but it has almost been 3 years. Isabella started her formal schooling in HK by enrolling in nursery or K1 as it's known here in August 2009 and now it's time to choose her primary school. Unlike the majority of HK parents, Jonathan and I were not concerned too much about sending her to so-called "Band 1" schools. These are the schools that are well-known in HK, high tuition fees, EMI (English as the medium of instruction), and located in posh areas.

No, we were just asking three questions:
1) Is it walking distance from our place?
2) Is the school CMI (Chinese as medium of instruction)?; and
3) Does the school offer extra support for non-native Chinese speakers?

These questions were in no particular order as they were all equally important to us as I believe one's school should be part of their immediate community, that the girls should learn Cantonese as that was a big reason why we moved to HK, and that we are not able to support them in their Chinese homework as we do not read or write Chinese.

I must admit that I got a little swept up in the frenzy of choosing a primary school when a colleague/friend, who also has a son Bella's age, started asking me about my options and my aims for her education. She laughed when I mentioned the proximity factor but nodded understandingly when I explained my learning-in-Chinese factor. We started calling (on the phone and in person) the schools that we were interested in and asked them whether they had open houses for prospective students' parents but most of them were unresponsive and couldn't fully answer our plethora of questions that betrayed us as parents going through this for the first time.

Then in the beginning of September, a bunch of notices from Bella's kindergarten school poured in. They were invitations to open houses, trial classes, parents' nights, to all the primary schools in our home area. I mean, the school administrators could have told us that when we were calling the schools ourselves then all of our questions and hypothetical situations would be answered.

TIP for expat parents of primary-ready kids in HK: all of the open houses and such happen in the period of August - September, but especially the real push comes in early September.

So every weekend this month, we've been spending time at different primary schools talking to different teachers, curriculum directors, students and principals about Bella and her needs. At all of the schools, we met non-native Chinese (e.g. South India, Caucasian, Korean) students who spoke Cantonese and Putonghua as fluently as far as I can tell. It's really amazing coming from a largely monolinguistic society (Toronto, Canada) that multi-lingualism comes so naturally to kids. To all of you out there who can speak more than one language, do not deny this gift to your own kids.

Finally, we chose a primary school that we had visited first. (It's always the first dress that you saw that you eventually buy - lol). It satisfies our three criteria and we get a good feeling from talking to the teachers and students. It also is a mixed socio-economic student population which will hopefully expose Bella to different types of people and their priorities.

But best of all, it's a comfortable 6 minute walk from our flat.