Time to Move, Again

Our lease ends in a little over two months’ time. Thank God. I can’t remember the reasons I said yes to this place last year. Probably because I was too busy thinking about my Europe trip and was running out of options.

MHV has nice trees and water fountains in the podium area, friendly security guards I haven’t seen anywhere else in Hong Kong; I’ll give them that. But for me, the problems with this place list far longer than the fact that the nice podium has turned out to be a public area.

1. Other than the Circle K and a doctor’s clinic, the “mall” downstairs just doesn’t bring any convenience. There’s a Wellcome designated for selling other branches’ leftover produce; there’s a Chinese restaurant serving food so crappy it’s only still in business because of its monopoly; there’s a cha-chaan-teng with a $40 minimum to deliver food right upstairs; there’s a tailor that handily closes at 6:30pm; while the rest of the mall doesn’t open till noon.

2. Minibus no. 12B runs a well-designed route between MHV, the MK MTR station and MK train station, but the queue for what must be the most infrequent minibus running in Hong Kong is at least 50-person long in the morning. The Olympic station is a good 10-minute walk away, through a narrow street lined with auto shops, hardware stores, dry cleaners, more auto shops, and one of those places that gathers paper and metal scraps from garbage for reselling. The walk leaves me drenched in sweat every morning before I even reach the station. Not to mention one can never feel the AC on the platform of the Olympic station, except for the blast that leaks out the doorway whenever the control room staff comes out of his glass house.

3. I don’t need to study fengshui to know that it’s a bad idea to live next to a funeral home. Mind you I already work next to one. I’ve been too squeamish to go through the details, but one can easily find online lists of “haunted flats” in MHV where residents/visitors have committed suicides.

4. The flat’s most definitely infested; I just can’t determine whether it’s with mold or dust bunnies. I haven’t seen this much mold since my friend’s science project in grade six. And for the amount of dust on my floor, it may as well be the cover of an antique book of witches’ brew recipes hidden in some geeky kid’s attic. I’ve given up hope of ever getting the place clean again, and can’t bear using the apartment for much more than sleeping and showering in. The situation is so hopeless I think I’m starting to grasp the reasons behind the high suicide rate here.

5. J’s skanky ex-coworker lives in Tower 3. Not that I’m threatened by an unattractive divorcee, but to this day I just can’t think of one good reason for her to have called up J at midnight to borrow a hammer. I’m as tired of trying to figure out what her problem is as I know she is tired of having to force phony smiles at me in front of J. This point was proven on Saturday when I bumped into her in the lift lobby and caught her looking away as if she didn’t see me after we made eye contact. It might not even have been her bitchiness, but just the fact that she came out of the elevator with a married man I’m acquainted with.

All this and the big rent hike that’s sure to come our way. The landlady’s taking her good old time coming up with a lucky number percentage to raise our rent by. But I’m not going to wait for her decision. I’ve already made mine.

Now if only I knew of a good place to move to.