Our Apartment in Mongkok, Hong Kong (2017)

People “back home” are always curious about where we live, so here are some photos of our Hong Kong apartment. Rent in Hong Kong is ridiculous, especially after you’ve been living in China for 15 years! We pay $13,000HK ($1650US) for about 310 square feet of living space–which is smaller than some of the guest-rooms we get to sleep in when visiting the US!

I’ll take photos from my blog, and say a little more in captions, but to make a long story short this was the 28th apartment we looked at, after our previous landlord raised the rent from 14,000 to 15,500 in Aug 2017. (We’d looked at about 30 apartments to find the old place too.) The new place is in the perfect location, just two blocks from the office; it has a nice kitchen and bathroom, along with two new air conditioners; we didn’t have to do anything but buy and add furniture – unlike “no. 24” (we had made an unsuccessful offer on #24), which would have needed us to install a kitchen and other things (at our expense). “No. 28” is smaller than our previous apartment (we are downsizing from 380 sq ft to 310), but it is also cheaper than staying put, which will save us enough in six months to pay for the furniture.

It’s very hard to get a photo inside a place this small, but when you put three photos together, you can start to get the idea. I’m standing by our tiny Christmas tree (on a table under the window), with the front door just out-of-view on the left, then kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, and finally closet. That’s the whole apartment!

Hopefully, this floor plan (posted by the elevator) will help you “see” it. Each floor has only one apartment, and we are on the top floor. I believe they said it was built in 1997.

Here’s the view of our office from the apartment, and the view of the apartment from the office. “Honey, dinner’s ready.” “I’ll be there in five minutes.”

Here’s the view from our bedroom. Just two short blocks from the office, I can’t imagine anything more convenient, and you can also get from Mongkok to most of HK’s population (on the peninsula or on HK Island) quite easily.

One reason we have such a nice view is because we are the top floor of a “needle” (one small apartment per floor) that sticks up over countless older buildings. HK has many taller buildings, but we feel fortunate to have found this 22nd-floor apartment.

Here’s another pair of photos from our bedroom (and closet) window. The “laser show” happens every night at the harbour.

We live in Mongkok, and one of the best things about our little home is the view. We would much rather watch the fireworks from here, than to get pushed around by the million people in TST watching this “up close”!

Into every life a little rain must fall. Ours came into the kitchen during our first rainstorm (the landlord sent someone to fix it, but it still leaks in a monsoon). The other photo is our uncrated wardrobe. Unfortunately, I told Ikea we’d build this one ourselves! It took two hours.

You can’t really back up very far to get a good picture in a 310 sq ft apartment! The double bed fits with a few inches to spare at the bottom, and enough room to one side to place a thin chest-of-drawers.

Our den from the bedroom. By putting keepsakes in the curio cabinet, we are saying we’re here to stay for a while. Like Biblical “stones of remembrance,” they remind us of friends and experiences of joy and grace. And we love it when a visitor asks for the back story!

Here’s a Google map to show you what I was looking at from the plane [next photo], namely the top part of Hong Kong Island, and the Kowloon peninsula. We live and work in the center of the latter (can you find that spot on the arial photo?). There’s a white block in the middle that shows 2 km (1.25 miles), just to give you some idea of scale.

As we flew into China from Hong Kong, I couldn’t believe the view of HK below! I grabbed my iPhone6 and got some wonderful photos of “home.” (Write to me if you want a bigger image.)

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