Our Apartment

After we arrived in Hong Kong, we were picked up by a driver who took us through the Chinese border and onward to our apartment in Shekou. We're only about a 5 minute drive from the border, so no wonder they flew us into Hong Kong! When we got here we were met by Jack (local staff who's in charge of assiting staff with apartments and settling in) and Lisa (an American who will be my director of instruction at the elementary school). 

 

We live in a complex called Coastal Rose Garden and we're on the 9th floor. The complex is really huge, with dozens of apartment buildings, and it stretches all along the waterfront overlooking Hong Kong.

 

When we got here there was an awesome gift basket full of valuable items for any newcomer: maps, guide books, toilet paper, chips, juice, wine, milk, water, towels and lots of other things. It was really, really nice of the school to provide these things for us.

My first impression was that the apartment was huge, especially compared to what we were given in Korea. This place is twice the size of our apartment in Ontario too, and it's FREE. So, let me go ahead and give you a tour:

In this picture, our front door is on the right hand side. There's a shoe closet right there and the dining room table on the left. The first entrance on the right is the kitchen and on the left is a weird little room mostly full of stuff from the previous tenants. We're keeping that door shut :D 

 

Example of creepy art left behind in that little room.

This is our kitchen. Pretty normal. Lots of counter space, but not a lot of usable cupboard space. We were pleasantly surprised that there was a microwave (one less thing to buy!), and not at all surprised by the lack of an oven (one more thing to buy!).

This is the living room- it's on the opposite side of the dining room. It came with a sofa (never had one of those before overseas!), a TV and DVD player with surround sound, and (most strangely) a piano.

 

The living room, from the other side.

 

 There's a huge balcony off the living room with a washing machine on it...

 

...and THIS is our amazing view from the balcony.

 

This is the hallway leading from the living/dining room area down to the bedrooms.

 

This is the spare bedroom. Lots of room for visitors *HINT HINT*. Currently being used to store cat things and the ironing board.

 

Across from the spare bedroom is the office. There's a desk and lot of storage space in there.

At the end of the hall is this pretty typical Asian bathroom, but better than we've ever had simply due to the size and the existence of a shower curtain to keep everything from getting wet!

Here's our bedroom! It's awesome! We have a king sized bed, and light switches on either side that control his and hers lamps. There's also SO MUCH cabinet space to store all of our clothes.

 

This is the amazing view from our bedroom. We can see Hong Kong from our bed. Crazy!

 And this is my favorite part. The biggest surprise of all. In the master bathroom we have a JACUZZI. Can you believe it? A jacuzzi! A jacuzzi with a CD player! In our Korean apartment we once bought an inflatable kid's pool just to take a bath.

Also, all the fixtures in this bathroom are glass so it looks really nice in there. We love it.

 

Like I said earlier, the grounds of Coastal Rose Garden are huge. There's a boardwalk that goes all along the water. On the grounds, we're lucky enough to have a pool that we can use any time, a gym, ping pong and tennis courts, and every building has a row of shops in it. And almost all the shops of full of foreign import goods and restaurants. It's literally amazing.

 

Rude statue outside our building.

And we're just a block away from a great shopping and dining area. But I'll post more about that later. It's going to be tough exploring China if we never want to leave our apartment!