Our New House (this isn't about our summer trip...)

Emily has just asked me to update our blog with a non-travel topic: Our New House! I'll get back to our trans-siberian trip in a couple of days.

For those of you who haven't heard, we moved over the summer. While we enjoyed living on campus last year, we were excited to move out and get our own place (with our own furniture, our own car, and our own dog). We're happy to report that Rudy is now living with us in our brand new village house.

Here's our building:
We live in the village area of "Lam Tsuen" in the "Tai Po" district of the New Territories (Hong Kong's hinterland, about 10 kilometers from the Chinese border). Here's a map showing where our village is. In the picture above, our house is on the top floor, on the right half of the building. We also have the rooftop, which I (Brad) am working to turn into a garden area (it's a big space, as you can see, so it's taking me awhile to buy enough plants to fill it):
And here's our front balcony (that's a lemon tree I bought, which we're hoping yields a few lemons this year!) You can't see from the photo, but our washing machine lives out there on our front balcony. It's the standard place to keep your washer in HK villages (in fact it's the only place where we have hook-ups for our washer):
...and the inside of the house. Here's our living room (with our new couch - the only decent couch we've ever owned!) Also, you'll notice that we have curtains in all the rooms of the house. We had those custom-made in Shenzhen, China (quite cheaply). And I'd like to report that I (Brad) picked out the material and general design of all the curtains ALL BY MYSELF. What do you think?
And another angle of our living room (which is also our dining room):
As you can see, our kitchen is open (which is very rare for Hong Kong). Here's 2 pictures of our kitchen:
And our large (for hong kong) bathroom. Yes, we only have 1. In our 3 bedroom house. Welcome to Hong Kong.
Here's our "master bedroom." It's tiny. There's not even enough space for night stands on both sides of the bed. But, it does have 2 windows, which is about all that sets it apart from the rest of our bedrooms:
Here's our spare bedroom. It's too small to get a good shot of the whole room, but there's a double-sized bunk bed in there. (this is the normal hong kong way of dealing with small space) Anyone want to come and stay with us? You'll feel like you're at summer camp as you sleep in your bunk bed!
We didn't get any pictures of our "closet room" as we call it. It's our third bedroom, and is about the same size as the bunk bed room (above). But, we've decided to turn it into a walk-in closet. It's actually kind of nice because Hong Kong bedrooms don't generally have closets. So, we put a couple of wardrobes into our third bedroom and it's become our closet!

We also didn't get any pictures of our car (above is a photo I got off the internet. it looks just like ours, only ours is a right-hand drive). We bought a 1999 Mazda from one of the teachers who just left our school. It's a bit of a clunker, but it was very cheap and is very good on gas. That's important, because the price of gasoline in hong kong is about $8.50 US per gallon. This is why so few people in hong kong own cars (there are about 500,000 licensed cars in HK, and over 7 million people living in the city) We carpool with another family when we drive to school, and they help us out with gas money. It's expensive, but we save a lot of money on rent by living so far from school, so it kind of evens out (and we love the freedom of car ownership). It's the first car we've owned in about 5 years, so we feel a bit like high school kids who've just gotten their drivers' licenses.