A Room with a View (or The Apartment Part 1)

After we landed on Thursday, a teacher from the school met us at the airport and brought us and our sizable mound of luggage directly to our apartment which is on the seventh and top floor of our school. It was 8:00 p.m. and we had all been up for over 30 hours. We dropped our luggage and were all pretty anxious to fall into our new beds, but not before checking out the place that’s going to be our home for the next 10 months.

Our apartment is fantastic. It –along with the school- is less than two years old. It is very large by Hong Kong standards; I would guess about 900 square feet. Our apartment is actually two studio apartments adjoined by a set of doors similar to what you would have in a hotel suite. One on side, Annika and Elise have twin beds and dressers. On their half is also the t.v., sofa, and chair; a desk, large book shelf, and a mammoth wardrobe, their own bath; and a kitchen –which is currently being used as storage. All the furniture was provided by the school.

In the adjoining studio apartment is Julie's and my double bed, a dining room table and chairs, another desk, another mammoth wardrobe, a dresser, the kitchen we are actually using, and a second bath. Because these are studio apartments, they don’t have separate bedrooms. Instead, the bedroom area is defined by using the mammoth wardrobe and the bookshelf to cordon off a portion of the apartment. It actually works pretty well. Thank heavens though for that set of double doors that separate us from the girls in the evening.

The apartment has ten-foot ceilings and the walls are white. Both the floors and the furniture are blond hardwood. Overall, it has a vaguely IKEA look to it, which isn’t all that surprising since several pieces of the furniture and most of the kitchen utensils did in fact come from IKEA.

Combined, our apartment(s) measures about forty feet by twenty feet; it’s a long narrow rectangle. And the coolest feature of the apartment is that on one side the long wall is all glass –floor to ceiling. It lets in so much natural light and gives us a great southern view. We have a balcony (actually, it’s two balconies) that runs the entire width of the apartment. In the next month or two, we are hoping to by some used patio furniture off of Craigslist, Hong Kong.

We have a great view from our apartment. Our view is framed by two brand new (they're not even occupied yet) 40-story apartment buildings. But in-between these buildings we have a great view of Shatin, which is the region we live in. We can see a big cluster of tall buildings, the canal, and the bike path. We have a great view of the commuter train line that runs right past our home. And in the distance, beyond the buildings, we can see some of the steep, green hill/mountains that make up 90% of Hong Kong. If we look down just beyond the brand new apartment buildings is a small cluster of relatively modest one-story apartment buildings or houses right next to the canal.

Altogether, our view provides a pretty good snapshot of Hong Kong: skyscrapers, green hills, bike paths, and commuter trains.