Cribs - Hong Kong Style

Well my "crib" here in Hong Kong isn't quite as interesting as the ones on the MTV show, but I figured I'd at least give you a pictorial tour of it. My house was brand new when I moved in so it was in very good shape which was really reassuring to me when I moved here. Some of the housing here can get ran down pretty fast. If I would have came here and saw that I had to live in some of the other houses in my village I would have probably hopped on the first plane back to the States. I got really lucky!

My house is a typical village house. The entire structure is 3 stories tall with each floor having about 700 sq feet which is pretty large compared to other houses in the village. It is a two bedroom, one bath, and about a 1/4 kitchen.

My kitchen has a floor space of about 5' x 8' and about 4 sq ft of usable counter top space. I have a microwave and an electric cook top. Ovens are not very common in Hong Kong and I doubt you would ever find a typical US oven in any house around here. Cook tops are the most common with them being either electric of gas.


My living room is pretty wide and open and is nearly impossible to keep clean with the tile floors. I always seem to track home grass and sand from work. The sliding glass doors open to a narrow balcony that has my washing machine on it. Yes, my washing machine is kept outside. I don't have a drier so I just hang all my clothes outside to let them dry. Sometimes I have to plan my laundry around the weather forecast to be able to dry my clothes as they don't dry too well in a rainstorm.

I am lucky enough to have cable provided for me as well. I believe I have the basic package which has both English and Chinese Channels on it. I mainly watch Discovery, National Geographic, and CNN. Even though these may seem like the same channels back in the States, the programming is very different on them. I don't get hours of Swamp Loggers or Ice Road Truckers, but I can usually watch re-runs of How It's Made or Mythbusters. There is very little commercials on these channels and in the rare time a commercial does come on, it is just a 30 second break from programming, then right back to the show. I now feel 'out of the loop' with everything as I'm not told what movies are coming out, or what is the best cellphone, or what the meat specials are at Fareway this week. Commercials were a great way for me to receive all sorts of information and now I don't have that type of incoming advertising.

My bedroom is pretty simple with a decent sized bed and a fairly thin mattress. Like normal, my feet do hang off the end a bit. Closets are not built in to most houses so everybody normally has a wardrobe type closet normally. When my house was "assembled", the workers just put everything together in my living room with the intent of letting me choose where to put everything. Well, the wardrobe was too big to maneuver around to get through the narrow hall and make the turn to my bedroom and was too tall to fit through the door, so they had to come back, take it apart, and then put it together in the bedroom. Shows the true value of looking at the big picture and planning ahead.

I hope you enjoyed this short tour of my house and soon I will post up some pictures that I will take of other houses and buildings around my village.