Fragrant Harbour

I spent last week in Hong Kong, ostensibly attending a conference on things educational. Such events tend to be very hit and miss - for every half decent presentation you stumble upon, you have to sit through hours of monotony as speaker after speaker tries to reinvent the EFL wheel. "How to make students more motivated to learn English" in all its variations is always a firm favourite. Exhortations to "increase their intrinsic motivation", or "enhance autonomous learning" are met with a barely stifled yawn, always accompanied by reams of statistics in a desperate attempt to give some faux academic respectability to some common sense observations. Asian academics are particularly guilty of this. So, we are told that students in the Engineering department of Shenzhen aren't all that interested in studying English, and, drum roll please, the presenter has the combined results from t-correlation, anova variance, and scatter regression analysis to prove it. By which time I am heading for the exit.

Thankfully, outside the exit was Hong Kong, which likes to term itself "Asia's world city". Not much you can argue with there, particularly if you are coming from Muroran, "Asia's New Jersey". It's also a bloody hot city, noisy too and one that is, in so many ways, immeasurably improved by nightfall. After dark is the time to do your sightseeing in Hong Kong - dazzled by the lights, you are blinded to the rather tattered city all too apparent during the day.