New Year, New Home part 4

We finally moved to a new apartment. We looked at so many different places that now I can't even remember what any of them looked like. Each one could be classified into two different styles. Every apartment in each style was just like all the others. There were always minor differences here and there, but it almost looked like they were all made by the same company. Maybe that is how buildings can go up so quickly in Hong Kong. They all follow the same blueprint.

The hardest part about picking an apartment was not what it looked like. It was finding one that we could all agree on. We did not want to vote and let the majority rule. We wanted it to be unanimous. If we took an apartment that one of us did not like, there would only be problems later. Since we all agreed on this apartment, hopefully we can stay here longer.

The second hardest part was location. Lily & I work at the same place, but Kevin works on the other side of town. Most expats, and most of the better apartments, are on Kevin's side of town. Living there would only make it harder for Lily & me to get to work. It would not really be hard. We would still take the MTR. It would just take longer.

I don't want to live around a bunch of expats anyway. What is the point of living in a foreign country if you are only surrounding yourself with other foreigners? I already work with a bunch of foreigners and I'm sharing an apartment with two foreigners. The last thing I want is to live in some gated foreigner community or exclusive building. I want as many Chinese neighbors as possible. I want to go outside and be in a Chinese neighborhood.

The third hardest part was the price. Kevin makes more money than the rest of us combined. We agreed right from the beginning that we would all pay an equal third of the rent. This meant that it had to be based on Lily's & my salary, not on Kevin's. Finding a cheap apartment in Hong Kong is easy. There are a lot of dumps out there. We wanted something nicer. With three people we could still afford something better, but we had to ignore some very nice places. There are a lot of cheap run-down apartments in Hong Kong, but there are also a lot of very nice luxury apartments. We limited our search to something in between.

Eventually, we found a place in our price range that was more or less half way between our jobs. It is technically closer to Kevin's job, but it has a free shuttle to an MTR station that goes almost directly to our job. That was the clincher for us. We were trying to decide between this apartment and another one that we all liked when we found out about the shuttle. We can always walk to the nearest MTR station, but then we have to transfer to the line where the shuttle goes. That shuttle just makes our lives easier.