HG
How did you get on?
Drinking himself silly, I shouldn’t imagine.
HG was getting well and truly blasted with the scottish guy when I left him at the china beach bar in mui wo yesterday afternoon around 4 PM (I was going back to the hell-hole that is Taiwan). he wants to live there and I can understand him. A great place and only 25 minutes away from central.
HK$4000 for a flat on the beach is a steal - and Mui wo is lovely.
that the place was packed with long-term expats does not surprise me.
HG
Thanks for the thanks in the Carnegie’s thread. After reading the above, it seems you like Mui Wo.
Glad to have been of some help.
Regards and hope you settle in well.
Bob
Sheung Wan/Kennedy Town is a nice area too if you want to be close to central. far away enough that it’s quite quiet. sure you won’t be living in an area surrounded by expats, but it’s nice.
If I was lucky enough to land a job in HK I would go for Mui Wo.
Your weekend would feel like a second-rate tropical vacation, that’s more than you can say about HK island.
Mr. He: Absolutely agree. I had a very nice 12 year ‘second-rate tropical vacation’ in Mui Wo. At least at the end of the day, I could get rid of that constant drone of traffic you get anywhere on HK Island near sea level. It’s only quiet on HK if you are super rich and live on The Peak or 50 floors up in a hermetically sealed box. Kennedy Town…quiet? Only if you are deaf. It’s a shit hole. Lovely big incinerator on the waterfront though; passed it over 7500 times on the ferry and often thought how lovely and quiet it would be to live next to all those warehouses, machine tool shops and the incinerator not to mention the six to eight lane flyovers just below the window with all that silently moving traffic.
I passed kennedy town on the way to the airport (Out hotel shuttle bus made a huge detour).
It looked ugly, run down etc.
Mui Wo would be the place for most sensible expats there.
If you had to leave HGC at 4 pm in Mui Wo to come back to Taipei and then went back to HK to pick up your bags to get on a shuttle bus to go to the airport, then I would definitely say that you made a HUGE detour!never mind, next time witha bit of forward planning, you could bring your bag to Mui Wo and get a cab and be at the airport in 30 minutes.
Kennedy Town, I agree is run-down and ugly. It has no redeeming features except that lovely, sexy incinerator on the waterfront.
My wife and I had a look at Mui Wo this weekend and last weekend. The first time we went, the weather was horrible. Cold as hell, raining and foggy. Nobody was out on the streets. We saw the back villages and weren’t too impressed. Some of the houses were nice, but the spaces between the houses was a mess. Due to the poor visibility, cold weather and lack of a map, we completely missed Wang Tong.
We went back this past weekend and had a good look in Wang Tong; much better than Lu Di Tang and the other Mei Wo villages. Perhaps the only drawback is that it seems to get more holiday renters than the other villages. We saw a few flats in village houses, some through a proper agent, others through people we bumped into on the street. The quality of the flats the agent showed to us was much better than the others, but the prices still seemed a bit high (5k/month for third floor). The flats shown to us by the village people were cheaper but shitty. It seemed like they were trying to get a stable tenant to stay in a holiday house. We didn’t see many postings at Wellcome, but there seems to be a decent number of non-holiday houses for rent.
The atmostphere was pretty nice. Not even considering price, I prefer it over DB. Now I have to covince my HK wife that living in a high-rise apartment block is actually something to be avoided when possible.
Oh, TpeBob, did you buy much fresh fish in Mei Wo? The two super markets had none and the wet market below the library hardly had anything. Where do locals buy fish?
Jive Turkey: Actually the second (top) floor* is what you should be looking for because that way you get the rooftop for BBQ’s etc. The landlord may even allow you to put up an awning so you can enjoy the space even when it rains. It’s also perfect for a dedicated beer fridge, vegetable garden, hanging up your washing etc. etc. You really appreciate living there when on a Sunday afternoon, you are on the rooftop reading the paper, enjoying a cold beer etc. and think about all those poor sods in their boxes in high rises fretting about how to have what you are enjoying. 5k is about right, especially when you consider that you in effect double your living area. Ground floors are not desirable unless there is a lot of space or a garden. Fresh fish can be got at the wet market very early in the morning but I never ate much fish while there. Most of it is caught in the Pearl River Delta and therefore contains a lot of crap you wouldn’t want to digest.
*In HK, it goes Ground, One Two, not One, Two Three. etc. (when i first got here I spent a lot of time in lifts on the ‘first floor’ waiting to go to the ground floor without realising that I was already there!).
You will need to adjust your spelling to the Cantonese pronounciations BTW.
Hope this helps.
Bob
I tried to explain that to my coworker, so he could pick up my bags, but he thought it too complicated. I therefore had to make the trip to central, pick up my bags, and then on to the other side if Lantau in order to catch an 8 PM plane. 
But well, no advance planning, just walking down to the pier and jump on the first boat to somewhere… Both Huang and I were somewhat hung over that morning, as we had spent the evening before drinking beer in:
- A cheap bar in Wanchai (That’s where I stayed).
- A sampan while cruising the Aberdeen typhoon shelter.
- Lan Kwai Fong.
After which Huang crashed in my hotel room.
[quote=“TpeBob”]*In HK, it goes Ground, One Two, not One, Two Three. etc. (when I first got here I spent a lot of time in lifts on the ‘first floor’ waiting to go to the ground floor without realising that I was already there!).
[/quote]
This is completely off topic (I’d use the icon, but it’s gone…) but that still catches me sometimes. Not so much the lift thing, but I have looked for places addressed 1/F and then belatedly realised they were on street level! Also looking for places on 2/F and thinking 'damn, two flights of stairs". There are benefits in merely moving from one British colony to another 
Damn, but couldn’t Taiwan have gained a lot of benefit from a few decades, if not centuries, under British rule rather than under the Dutch or Japanese! Imagine all the ways in which it would be better now if we’d played a bigger role in its history. 
But this is a subject that deserves a whole thread of its own.
Omni: I totally agree. A few centuries of British rule here and we’d be able to go out and buy a decent curry any time of day instead of the shit we get here.
i still think Sheung Wan is a nice place (and it’s not the same as Kennedy Town. it’s actually different. dunno why i lumped them together) but it’s nice. check it out.
I am just worried that Tigerman might appear in this thread and politicise it…
Maybe this is one thread he knows nothing about?
:offtopic:
Oddly enough, despite your ancestral best efforts, Australia isn’t big on Indian food - Chinese (Cantonese) food is the Indian food of Australia Go to a flyspeck town in the middle of nowhere, and it’ll still have a Chinese restaurant. I mean, you can get Indian food, and it’s good, but it’s not ubiquitous like it seems to be in England.
Now wandering off into the off topic sunset…
[quote]HG
Thanks for the thanks in the Carnegie’s thread. After reading the above, it seems you like Mui Wo.
Glad to have been of some help.
Regards and hope you settle in well.
Bob[/quote]
Cheers Bob.
It now looks like my ridiculous working hours will prevent me from my planned tropical paradise. Man you got lots of mates there and I pulled on your guanxi - not intentionally I hasten to add, just that when folks in that town knew I knew you I was sorted. Andrew says a big hello. It was in his company that I parted from Mr He. who indeed made a circuitous route back to Taiwan but had the knowledge and no choice.
Still hinkered down in my Causeway Bay hovel. Just getting over hating life and ready to make a go of it again. 40 really is too old for changes like this.
Anyway Bob, I will be back in Taiwan within the next couple of months and I will track you down and proffer the approrpriate amount of free drinks. In the interim, my other name is Craig, I’m an Australian and a good friend of Mark, Pete and that gang. Oh, and Mr. He’s.
Cheers again to ya!
Dasgrrl. There are great curries in Oz . . . aren’t there? Surely I couldn’t have deluded myself that badly. I’m off to Jojo’s jojofood.com/
HG