First steps

Hey guys!  You're reading my first attempt to write a blog-type thing, and hopefully you guys can learn something about life here on the other side of the world.  (Oh, and Lucy, if you're reading this, yes, my camera sucks.  No, I do not have the budget for a nice DSLR, nor do I want to fumble with one here)  Since I have no idea how to format or make this thing look anywhere near decent, any help would be very much appreciated!

So first things first.

This is where I sleep at night.  Along with two other members of my family.

Remind you Vimy guys of anything?

This is Lido Garden (麗都花園), in Sham Tseng (深井).

Marked "A" on this map, it's a small, relatively quiet suburb (see below) of the city, about 22 kilometres away from the city centre, creatively named "Central" (中環) and marked "B" on this map.  The airport is to the far left, in that oddly shaped (artificial) landmass called Chek Lap Kok (赤鱲角).

And of course, by "suburb", I mean something like this:

The outside of my building.

Here's the rest of the flat (yet another remnant of the hundred fifty year long British rule over the territory), minus the other two bedrooms and the two bathrooms.

With a bonus younger brother thrown in!

The whole place is 763 square feet.  And its market value is somewhere between three to four million Hong Kong dollars. Or $400-550 CAD.

And that's cheap.

If you don't believe me, have a look at this local real estate agency's storefront:

remembering that the Chinese count in ten thousands, of course.

To get a home the size of the average one in Toronto, say, 2000 square feet, you would need to fork over some 25 million Hong Kong dollars - or over 3 million Canadian.  For a 2000 square foot apartment some 22 kilometres away from downtown.

Its these prices that are largely driving the Toronto (and Vancouver) housing bubbles.  For the same money, you would be able to buy a nice mansion in affluent West Vancouver, or six bungalows in well-off Willowdale.  And that's exactly what many from Hong Kong and major cities in mainland China do.

Except most of them never move in.

To make some sense of the insane housing situation here in Hong Kong, you have to look at the landscape itself.  Look at that Google Map again.  See all that green space?  All protected parkland.  In fact, some 40 percent of the total land mass in Hong Kong is designated "Country Park"(郊野公園) , basically untouched wilderness.
There's a reason such a large percentage of the land is parkland.  This is the view from my bedroom:

Less than half a kilometre away, there are some pretty unusable mountains.  Hmm.  So what about on the other side of my apartment complex?

The Tsing Ma Bridge there is the longest double-decker suspension bridge in the world.

The ocean.  Great.  If you go onto Google Maps and zoom into Lido, you'll see that the whole complex is built on reclaimed land - as is basically everything in this city, from the airport to most of the skyscrapers.

With seven million people, all sharing the same kilometre or so of land around the coast that people can actually build on, it's easy to see how real estate is so expensive.

So anyway, waking up this first full day from a rather restless night (the air-conditioner in my room is old and LOUD), we went downstairs and across the street to my brother's favourite place in Sham Tseng, a tiny neighbourhood joint by the name of 鴻記點心餐廳 (it's fine if you can't read that, you're not really missing out on anything), for a regular Hong Kong style breakfast.

I had a lotus-leaf wrapped sticky rice stuffed with chicken (糯米雞) and a milk tea, my brother had phoenix talon (it's actually marinated and sauced chicken foot) and spareribs on rice (鳳爪排骨飯) and an iced lemon water (think ice tea with lemon slices and without the tea), and my mother had a preserved cabbage and pork rice vermicelli in soup (雪菜肉絲米) with ham and eggs on the side and a coffee, while my grandmother just wanted to chat.

For lunch, we went out to the nearby town of Tsuen Wan (荃灣), to a place called Sushi Express (爭鮮回轉壽司), where the sushi is "delivered" to you like this:

A giant conveyor belt, from which you remove your selections.  This novel way of eating sushi was invented in Japan in 1958, but only caught on in the 70s and 80s, where it spread across Asia.  Hong Kong people seem to have a fondness for anything Japanese, and there are conveyor belt sushi restaurants across the city. Traditionally, the bill is calculated from the amount and type of plates you have on your table at the end of the meal, with each plate colour signifying a different price point.  At this joint, all plates are HK$8 (CAD$1.05).

Afterward, we walked down to the neighbourhood wet market (街市), so called because the floors are always wet with... something.  Wet markets are roughly equivalent to farmer's markets in that they sell the freshest produce available, but also sell the freshest meat(and by freshest I mean - in some cases - killing and cleaning an animal in front of you, which may be a source of some of the wetness...) and a variety of cooked food items. Here's a picture of the produce floor at this particular market:

and of course, this is spacious by local standards!