House Hunting / Weekend Update

The time has come to find somewhere to live, since we can't live in hotels forever! We've been very lucky having lots of time and help to find somewhere, most people come over and have to make a snap decision in the first week or so (this is particularly bad as most rentals are for 24 months!).

Friday night we moved out of the place we'd been staying for a month and into the new place.

Will be nice not having to pack up again!

Think I've already said this but new place is so much better than the old place, it even has an outdoor swimming pool! The old place was fairly small and they'd tried to squash too much stuff in to make it more of an apartment and presumably look better in the brochure! Still, we weren't paying so can't complain and it was very handy for my work! New place is a fancy suite in a nice hotel with lots of room and a decent view over the harbour.

Pip likes the view!

We thought we best check out the food options in our new area and went into a random Chinese restaurant. We were just going to order our usual favourites but opted for the set menu / meal deal at last minute.

I think it was about £20 total and we got so much food, it was amazing!

Random street eating, the dish you can see is green beans with chilli and garlic, given to us while we were choosing.

Next up, the 'appetiser' - marinated chicken. 

Sweet and Sour Pork (at this point we were a bit confused since there was a soup course too but just assumed they'd missed it out). 

This was just wow! The menu said 'sliced chilli beef' so we were just expecting a plate with chilli beef on, instead we got a massive bowl of chilli beef peppery soup with noodles and all kinds of awesome flavours - it was brill!! 

Then the soup arrived?! Clearly we were a bit full but this was also really good and you can see it was also full of chicken wontons! 

And just in case we were still hungry we finished off with fresh warm doughnuts.

Saturday saw us head into 'Central' for a few drinks.

Starting the night with a mango mojito at my favourite $30 cocktail bar 

Met up with a mate in the Globe for a couple of ciders (yay my favourite cider in HK, went for apple and blackcurrent as thought it was quite autumnal, even though it's not autumn at all here!). 

Back to Soho corner to catch the end of happy hour!

We then got a taxi to Wan Chai (must have been drunk?! a whole £3!) for cheap food, since we haven't worked out where to eat in Soho really yet, apart from the pizza place!

Cheap thai food - Stephen has mastered the chopsticks!!

Finally ending the evening at Wooloomooloo, the exciting rooftop bar I'd been to earlier in the week - Stephen was suitably impressed! To help Stephen stay up a bit later / fight the jet lag we got the tram home.... it is sloooow over long distances (but still only costs 19p haha!). Don't think it took that long, half an hour maybe? 

Sunday was more of a lazy day so we got the MTR over to Mong Kok late on in the afternoon to feel like we'd not wasted the day! It was another exciting place - very busy but I did love the crazy markets!!

Will be back to stock up on tacky t shirts no doubt - 5 for £8 at full price and I'm sure you can haggle them down!! 

Ahhh couldn't resist!!! (Note the trashy mag Stephen brought back from England in the background! Can get them here but they're like £5 each and I don't care that much!).

Stephen spent most of yesterday house hunting as his company generously pay for 'relocation specialists' to help us find somewhere. They picked him up in a fancy taxi and took him round the more central areas. Stephen was under strict instructions to take lots of notes and pictures! They then picked me up about midday and I had an extended lunch break looking at a few properties with them. Ahhh decisions are difficult!! We have a set budget so can have something small in central, medium by my work and big by Stephen's work. Accommodation here is stupid prices, for what we'll be paying here we could probably have a 4 bed house with a garden in Leeds!! It's tough because the small places in central are all in really quite fancy blocks, like going home to a really swish (but small!) hotel every day. We did see one out in Taikoo though which was really quite big, had nice views and had been done out really nicely. After a wander round a couple of areas last night we decided to go for the Taikoo one.... it's slightly over budget and we haven't heard back yet whether we can have it for what we want or not yet, but fingers crossed! If not though then it's not meant to be and the company will show us some more on Saturday - watch this space!! Very exciting though, very much looking forward to having somewhere to call home and unpacking properly!! One of the blocks did have these awesome displays though, so I could be swayed by that....