Hi!
As I already mentioned
I am currently staying in HK where I’m doing an internship. I decided that
instead of creating a whole new blog for this, I am going to use this blog for
my posts about Hong Kong as well. I just think this is easier than creating a
new blog that will immediately die after I go back to Finland. Maybe this will
motivate me to be more active here as well!
But anyway, on to the
main reason for this post:
My experiences in Hong
Kong so far! I will try to divide this into different posts to make it more clear.
Part 1. Flea Bottom and Kingslanding- about HK
living
So where to begin? I
arrived here about six weeks ago (holy hell has it been that long?) on the 6th
of September. Susanna, the other intern met me at the airport as we had
agreed earlier. We immediately hit it off and I am honestly overjoyed to share
this experience with her. We took a bus to Causeway Bay to go see our rooms
that I will refer to as Flea Bottom from now on. We had arranged to see the
rooms through an agency called Wing Kong. And dear God. We knew that the rooms
in HK are expensive and not very big, but I could never have expected that. At
first the room didn’t seem that bad, it was small sure, but that was something
I could live with. The room however was in dire need of a deep clean. It had
clearly not been cleaned since the last tenant had left (only a few days ago I
was told by the other room-mates).
And it kept getting
worse. My room-mates where great, they were all really kind and helpful people.
They told me however, that the room I was staying in had a problem with the
windows leaking when it was raining outside. This seemed like a huge problem
since an entire wall in the room was just windows. The room was extremely
small, so the bed was right next to that wall. My room-mates told me that the
girl who lived in the room before me used to iron her bed to get it dry after
rainy days.
The room also had bugs
crawling in the bed. I saw a lot of small ants and what looked like a
cockroach. I do realize that there are cockroaches in big cities but this… If
it had been just one, but no, it was the other bugs as well. I also saw what
looked like bedbugs. Just thinking about it still makes me shiver.
Susannas room wasn’t
any better. Her entire apartment was crawling with cockroaches. And again, I
know they are common in big cities but her apartment was full of them.
Everywhere you looked you could see a new one crawl out from somewhere. They
were everywhere: in the bed, in the rice cooker (!) and on the sofa. On top of
this her room didn’t have any windows.
Now I understand we
had panicked and signed the contracts too soon (we were afraid we wouldn’t find
any other rooms because the company said that the ones we saw where the only
ones available. We later found out that they will do this to everyone: tell
people there isn’t anything else available so that they can sell the less
desirable rooms) but when we signed we didn’t know about the bugs or the
leaking windows.
Needless to say; we
had to move. We started looking for a new place. This was honestly a very hard thing
to do. We were stressed because we were in a new city and on top of that the
rooms we were staying in were no place to relax. They just made getting settled
in more difficult. In the midst of missing home and Tony (seriously, I had no
idea you could miss someone like that) I would really have needed a place that I
could rest in, but I didn’t even unpack. I didn’t want to put any of my stuff
in that room. So we kept looking. Luckily Susanna soon found a room that seemed
very promising, the only trouble was, there was only one bed in the apartment,
even though there were two bedrooms. The landlord however, was kind enough to
provide a second bed when he heard about our situation. He and his girlfriend
were very helpful, and we arranged a viewing of the room right away. We fell in
love with the place. It is in a small village in new territories. We have the
entire apartment to ourselves, with kitchen, living room, two bathrooms and two
bedrooms plus one smaller room. It is even cheaper that the first rooms we had.
The only drawback is that its further away from the city centre, but getting to
Hong Kong island is still super easy and I will take the long commute over the
bedbug infested tiny room with the broken door handle any day. I must say I
also quite like getting to know this side of Hong Kong as well, We can get to
Causeway Bay and Kowloon any time, but if we hadn’t moved here, we would probably
never have seen this side of HK.
So now we are settled
in in our flat that we call Kingslanding and enjoying the more laid back side of
Hong Kong while still being able to visit the city centre and the attractions
anytime. This was the story about us moving from Flea Bottom to Kingslanding,
and I will be back soon with a post that is more about the city itself and life
here and less bitching about bugs and leaking windows!
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| Flea Bottom 1. |
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| Flea Bottom 2. |
