Hong Kong Blog

Waking to your alarm is never a good thing in my books – the creators certainly named it fittingly. The thing is trouble. Recently its sound has foreworn classes far too early in the morning, exams and now… work. The very concept seemed slightly foreign to me (no pun intended). I’d been told to report to the HSBC floor in the ICBC building located in Central at 9AM and so donning my new suit and with a typical mixture of naivety, nerves and enthusiasm I arrived about an hour and a half early. The ICBC Tower is near the intersection of Garden Road and Queen’s Road in the heart of Hong Kong’s financial district and the place is absolutely pish posh. I felt like a nobody walking along the marble floors, slowly making my way up to the HSBC floor in elevators that probably cost twice as much as the majority of people will ever earn (yes… this is an exaggeration, call it poetic license). Aside from a floor number I was only given the name of the person I was to report to and without any idea of what that person looked like, where exactly he’d be in a huge room of desks or generally anything at all really, so I decided to go for a wander.

Thankfully the first person who approached me as I was walking about spoke extremely decent English and informed me where my manager would be sitting when he arrived. She also offered me food, a drink and was quite pretty so my day was looking up already! After about 30 minutes another lady came over and asked for my details and handed me a security card (to go with my staff ID card) which would grant me access through the various scanners to allow me to enter the room in the ICBC tower.

After another thirty minutes or so my manager arrived, introduced himself and invited me to grab a cup of coffee downstairs. As my interviews had all been conducted over the phone he wanted to get to know a little bit about me in person: why I applied for the job, what I hoped to get out of the experience, what sort of projects have I enjoyed working on in the past etc – fairly similar to the first interview with HR though much more relaxed. After then telling me a bit more about himself he told me that he had a project lined up for me and that I would be working as part of a team in the main HSBC Headquarters building in Queen’s Road Central… on the trading floor! And so with a deep breath I gathered my things and we headed to one of the famous landmarks of Hong Kong. Where I would be working. On the trading floor! For a year!! The world seemed absolutely crazy.

I’m not going to talk about any of the work I do in any kind of significant detail (or name anyone) for company policy reasons, however I will say that the work is all I could have hoped for and more. It’s a highly, highly pressured environment where everyone shouts at each other when things are going well and even more so when they’re going badly. My team have been absolutely fantastic in teaching me about the Future and Equity markets, in the principles of trading and broking, and how the entire IT infrastructure works. I report for work every morning at 7:30am and leave somewhere between 6-7pm. In the winter due to daylight saving in Australia I’ll have to arrive for 5:30am. The workload is high, the work is intense and the days are long, but the experience is awesome. If you’d have told me six months ago where I am now I’d have laughed.

The first few days after work I could barely stand, I called home and felt exhaustion controlling my speech. But I love it. In London you’d add an extra 30 minutes to every journey just in case there are any delays, but here I leave 45 minutes before I’m due to start for a 45 minute journey. I walk out of the nicely air-conditioned HSBC building everyday for lunch and get hit by a wave of heat that could melt Antarctica in a second. I head to a nearby water fountain to eat my sandwiches or go to a local Chinese restaurant for absolute peanuts. I really don’t mean to sound corny about it all but it really does feel like I’m one of the luckiest people in the world right now.

Joe and I meet up after work each day to grab some food and wind down. During the first week of work we met at Festival Walk each evening and treated ourselves on the Friday to Transformers at the cinema. This last week we decided to branch out a little and on Monday I met with Joe who suggested a restaurant he had been to with some colleagues at work. Now I only what he’s told me about these guys, but from the looks of things… well. After sitting down at a table with gold-crested chop sticks and hearing the romantic music in the background, we were given some Chinese tea handed to us on glass-holders in the shape of hearts. Indeed everyone there thought we were a very cute couple. I like Joe and all but…

The following day we met with Stephanie after work who took us to the IFC building – the tallest in Hong Kong – and we tried some of the Shanghai cuisine. I’ve never been overly successful in dealing with spicy food… I tend to think the “no spice” option in Nandos is the super-mega-ultra-spicy one, but this food burnt my mouth I swear! Just before the entire room was covered in smoke I asked for a glass of water, and they returned with boiling water. Ahhh.

On Wednesday we met in Central and we began a quest to find the Jewish Community Centre after several rave reviews from friends and family at home. The centre is located on Robinson Road which is fairly high up; indeed Hong Kong is dominated by steep, hilly terrain, which makes it the home of some rather unusual methods of transport up and down the slopes. The ‘Central-Mid-levels escalators’ is the longest outdoor covered escalator system in the world, linking Des Voeux Road in Central with Conduit Road in the Mid-levels, passing through narrow streets. According to wikipedia ‘Daily traffic exceeds 55,000 people, although originally forecast to transport 27,000, and using it is free of charge.’ As is typical with any Jewish centre we were searched thoroughly at the door by an armed guard even though we presented our passports (and were tested on their details). At last we gained access and though we couldn’t join (and probably aren’t going to in the future due to the price) we ate like kings. While Joe had gone to change out of work clothes after the meal, the Rabbi approached me and I explained who I was and where I came from. He began telling me (quite a bit) about a girl who was also in Hong Kong and about my age and I joked that he was trying to marry off. He simply replied with a shrug and said, “why not”. Thankfully Joe had returned at this point and I quickly steered away from the topic by laughing and saying that I was trying to convert Joe through Jewish food… he also didn’t think this was too funny and told us profoundly that he should be a “good whatever he is”. After talking a bit longer Joe and I decided it was time to leave and so we headed back to the University to get as much sleep for work the next day as possible.

Like I said before work is extremely, extremely intense and anyone thinking about working in Hong Kong should be prepared for its nature. But while I only know the fundamentals of trading, I know I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 4th, 2007 at 1:37 pm and is filed under Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.