Forest Hill

Here are some photos of our new nest as promised.


We'll go from the top down... This is the view from our rooftop. Doesn't really look like Hong Kong from here, does it?

It's nice to think about having a barbecue tea on the roof one day, but right now it is just too hot to contemplate. The washing machine is up on the roof too in a little alcove.

This is the kids' playroom on the third floor. I am still putting books away. When we bought this stripey floor rug from Ikea, Jemilla and Keegan immediately lined up all their cars on the stripes and had a race.

Jemilla's doll house is currently in the playroom, but I think we'll move it into her bedroom when Tirzah moves into her own room.

There are lots of shelves and cupboards in the playroom for all our books and toys. We initially thought we would have to store our kids' books at the school but God has given us an apartment with more bookshelves than even we can fill!

Okay, the three bedrooms and two bathrooms are on the second floor. This is Jemilla's bedroom with a loft bed and desk. Tirzah has been sleeping in here on the floor until we can get a bed for her. You can see that I still have to find a home for all Jemilla's chapter books.

This is Keegan's bedroom. No photo of the bed, I'm afraid, as it wasn't made. Besides the built in cupboard for Keegan's clothes and a desk and a bedside table, he has six gorgeous drawers for all the lego. (Carla, eat your heart out!) The only problem is that the drawers are easily accessible by someone else.

This is the main bedroom. I accidentally left the windows open one afternoon while doing school pick up and there was a storm. The rain actually came down sideways and totally drenched our bed and carpet. So now I am trying to dry out the room and get rid of the wet dog smell.

I've arranged a few treasures above the desk in our room.

Our ensuite, complete with a very fancy toilet called a Toto that can heat the toilet seat and wash certain unmentionable parts of your anatomy for you, if you so desire. (No, we have NOT used it...we're too chicken to try it out!)

I've included a photo of our shower because it took us a full ten minutes the first time we wanted a shower just to figure out where the taps were!

Our bedroom window has a view of the Hong Kong Institute for Education, partly obscured by trees.

The living room is down the bottom of the apartment. We would never have chosen a white leather lounge with children, but it actually wipes clean fairly easily.

It has an interesting colour scheme, don't you think? Craig LOVES the big TV and surround sound. (It all came with the apartment.)

The kitchen is quite large and open.




Can you guess which cupboard holds the fridge and freezer?



This is our dining table (obviously).

This is the keyless lock on our front door. It has a fingerprint ID for entry, so we can feel like we are part of the Mission Impossible Team.

These are the lobby doors. The lift to our apartment is inside to the left.

So what do you think about our apartment? Truthfully we think it's a bit fancy for the Harveys, but we're not complaining!

Q and A time

Hello to all my loyal readers! I have really appreciated all your comments sent via email or on specific entries. I am conscious that I have not answered all your questions, so this post is dedicated to catching up...


How are Jemilla and Keegan coping at school? When we left Australia we weren’t sure which classes the kids would join because of the different education systems. So far they have adjusted very smoothly to their new classes and new schools. Jemilla is slightly behind in maths, but streaks ahead in reading. The kindergarten has a curriculum night on Friday, so I'll find out how Keegan's doing academically then. I have really had to stress the need for Keegan to wear a hat while outside as sun safety is not enforced at all here. Both kids currently have a substitute teacher as their actual teachers are on maternity leave. Jemilla wears her uniform for sport days. Keegan has a red apron that many of his classmates treat as a uniform. He doesn’t like wearing it at all, so we have said that he only needs it for painting.

Is Craig working? Craig started working last week with one day off for the typhoon. He has been travelling around one hour ten minutes each way while he gets settled in to his new role and meets the staff. He is learning lots about local customs and laws. He says he finds it difficult to engage in detailed conversations with people for whom English is their second language, but overall it is going very well. The weather here is just too hot for a suit and tie, so he splurged and bought himself some new dress shirts. He has also found a wonderful bakery at the train station with 60-cent fresh savoury buns, so he often indulges there for his lunches.

What sort of food are you eating? This has been a real challenge for me as I am not a particularly good cook anyway. In Australia I relied a lot on packet mixes and sauce jars to add to vegetables and meat making easy meals. Obviously the food is quite different here, and most of it is expensive. After school today we took a long taxi drive to an “international” supermarket just to buy some minced beef which the locals don’t seem to cook with at all. Yoghurt and cheese and other dairy products are way out of our price range. Thankfully fresh fruit like bananas and apples and oranges are affordable. I would like to learn to cook Chinese food, but I don’t know where to start. Maybe you can pray that I will find someone who has the patience to teach me where to buy the right ingredients and how to prepare them. There are two supermarkets online which home-deliver; it’s very convenient.

Have you been to any more churches? We think we will stay at Sha Tin Church, the second one we tried. There are so few churches in English and we are really enjoying the sermons, music, Sunday school, and people there.

Is your house in Perth rented yet? Praise the Lord, yes! Our house in Landsdale has tenants.

Are the cars sold? Not yet. The Matchetts are looking after our two cars in Perth, but please join us in praying that they will sell soon.

Is it far to public transport? Our apartment is a fifteen minute drive to the train station, but there is a shuttle bus every quarter hour or so. We can also take taxis or local buses just about everywhere we need to go. It is very expensive to own and drive a car here. All forms of public transport here in Hong Kong seem cheap and efficient, although not terribly pram-friendly. The language barrier has caused a few problems for me, however, when conversing with taxi drivers. Many of them have no English whatsoever. I try to have the Chinese address on hand to show them, but several times I have still been driven the wrong way and struggled so hard to make myself understood. I dislike having to pay extra money if the driver goes the wrong way or to the wrong destination. It reminds me of when we lived in the Ivory Coast and new American missionaries would arrive and try to speak to the Africans in their mangled French. We would snigger at their “pathetic” attempts, and now I’M IN THE SAME POSITION. It’s ironic as well how pedantic I was about car safety in Australia, and here Tirzah sits on my lap in the back seat, bouncing along with her seat belt-less brother and sister. The kids’ schools are a five-minute-drive apart. We usually take a taxi from our apartment to Jemilla’s school, let her out, continue to Keegan’s campus, walk him to his door, walk to the train station, then catch a shuttle bus home.

Are you around for school pick-up, so have you met any mums/dads? As I mentioned, I have been doing all the school drop-offs and pick-ups, but this has been another challenge for me. It’s hard to tell the child-minders from the parents, and many of them cluster together and speak Chinese amongst themselves. Thus, I have been drawn to the few Anglo parents who have been very friendly, but I am conscious of the language and cultural divide between groups.

Will you need to buy some furniture for the house? We need to buy a bed for Tirzah as she is just sleeping on a mattress on the floor. We also need a hall table, but otherwise the apartment (and one shopping trip to Ikea) has provided everything we need.

Do you have a courtyard? No courtyard, but we do have a rooftop.

Have you had to buy appliances? Our new friends from church kindly gave us this brand new rice cooker as a sort of house-warming present. We bought a sandwich press, iron, and toaster this week and may or may not get around to buying an electric kettle. The house has a washing machine and a fridge and two TVs and a DVD player, so we didn’t need to get any of those. We can dry clothes off the balcony. Craig just bought this Pentax digital camera for a great price so you may notice a difference in the photo quality of the pictures I put on the blog.

Are there other families in the apartments around you? There must be some children around, but they are never in the playgrounds when we go. Most families here have a “helper” or child-minder to take them from place to place.

Do you find all those skyscrapers overwhelming? No, but we do miss having a backyard with grass to run around on.

Were there any breakages in your boxes shipped from Perth? We haven’t found anything broken, praise the Lord. The boxes were quite battered, however. Most things have found a place in our new apartment. I have a few regrets about some items we sold or gave away, but I just have to surrender them as gone.

Have you been to a library in Hong Kong yet? We will certainly be visiting the local library as soon as our Hong Kong ID cards arrive and we are allowed to borrow.

Are you intending to work, Renee? With the high cost of renting our apartment I expect that I will need to bring in some income by returning to teaching. However, the Hong Kong tax system is in our favour if I don’t work until the new year. I’ve investigated a few special education schools and classes here online, so we’ll see...

How are you coping with the heat? We are very thankful to have air conditioning in our apartment. Tirzah has some heat rash on her neck and shoulders, I’ve noticed. Hopefully the weather will start to cool down soon.

Have you had any time to go op-shopping yet? I have discovered this is a cultural difference between Australia and Hong Kong. People here are disinclined to buy anything “used”. Therefore, there are not very many secondhand stores. I believe there are some Salvos stores in a few suburbs, so I will definitely try to hunt them down at the first opportunity. However, my op-shop addiction seems to have abated considerably here. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? I wonder…

Teddy Bears Picnic

Keegan's class had a special Teddy Bears picnic on Wednesday last week. Because of the typhoon hours earlier, it was held inside but I think the kids still had fun.

You can view more photos of the picnic on the school's website: http://www.nis.edu.hk/index.php?option=com_zoom&Itemid=115&page=view&catid=75&PageNo=1&key=0&hit=1

A tale of two playgrounds

This afternoon we had a few hours to fill so we went to the two separate playgrounds within our complex. The first one is outside...

And the second one is an indoor playground...

The sad thing is that of all the times we have been to the playgrounds, we have only ever seen one other child using them. What a waste!

There's even a little lending library for children ... all in Chinese, I'm afraid.

Plus two foosball tables, ready for Bowen and Flynn to enjoy.

A Hong Kong ABC

There's a great little op shop in Yokine, Perth, called Save the Children where I used to hunt down cheap secondhand books and toys for our kids. Soon after I heard that Craig had been offered the job in Hong Kong, I just happened to find a book for one dollar called A Hong Kong ABC. Written and illustrated by Jacqui Taylor and printed in 1994, each page in the book features the author's son Christopher and his cat engaged in typical Hong Kong activities. The back cover reads, "This book was designed for anyone between four and one hundred and four. For the very young to enjoy the sound of the words read by an adult. For older children, to encourage the use of the glossary, (and their own dictionaries), to increase and improve their vocabularies. Lastly, for adults and children alike, the enjoyment of bright detailed illustrations, giving a little insight into Hong Kong life."

I couldn't really appreciate the illustrations and text in this book while in Australia. They just seemed so "foreign". Now, however, we are living out the pages.

Look at this illustration for the letter W.

The text reads,

"W is for walla walla that crossed the harbour wide,

wallowing from Wanchai till it reached the other side.

He walked to the walled city whilst whistling a tune,

wishing for wet watermelon in the wilting heat of noon."

What once seemed so foreign is slowly becoming familiar.

Extreme Makeover

Some of you might remember Tirzah's little doll "Alinta" whom she carries everywhere and is much loved and, as a result, often much in need of a bath. I do put Alinta in the washing machine from time-to-time but lately she has been looking extra grotty. I had bought a spare doll in our suitcases from Perth in case the dire situation arose whereby we lost Alinta here in Hong Kong, and I decided that today was the day I would replace the old with the new.

So Alinta magically transformed from this...

to this...

At first Tirzah didn't even recognise the doll. She kept asking for her Alinta, whom I had hidden away. I lied and told her I had brushed Alinta's hair, washed her clothes, and cleaned her face (just like Makka Pakka). And after an afternoon Tirzah seems to have accepted Alinta II.

Tirzah likes to hold Alinta's hand and have Jemilla hold the doll's other hand when they're walking somewhere.

HK Identity Cards

Today Craig did not go into work as we had an important appointment to get our Hong Kong identity cards. The government here requires everyone over the age of 11 to carry one. When we opened our bank account, signed the apartment lease, and organised connection of cable TV we were repeatedly asked to show our ID. It wasn't a huge problem that we didn't have one until I visited the local library and was flatly told no borrowing items without an ID card. Those of you who know me well and my love of reading will understand the speed with which I then organised an appointment to get the necessary cards. This morning Craig and I took the train to the Immigration Department and were subsequently photographed, fingerprinted (my first time), and told our paperwork was acceptable. I don't have the card yet to show you, but here's a photo of my wonderful husband.

Two interesting things happened while we were in the building.

It turns out that the Immigration office is in the same building as an international Christian kindergarten, very similar to the one for whom Craig works. We popped in for a quick visit, as Craig is always keen to foster healthy networks between schools. I enjoyed seeing how an early childhood facility (complete with playground, bike track, and P.E. room) could exist on a seventh floor of a high rise. Craig enjoyed chatting with the staff member who kindly gave us the impromptu tour.

The second thing that was buh-buh (Auslan sign for strange) was that this morning we bumped into not one but two families that we knew. Here we are, we've only been in Hong Kong for three weeks and in a random suburb we run into one family from school and another family from church. Coincidences or God-ordained encounters?

Not ALL a bed of roses...

We've been enjoying the excitement and adventure of living in a new country for three weeks now. Not everything is perfect, however, and the purpose of my blog is to inform you of the good the bad and the ugly.

Well, here's a great example of the ugly...

We've discovered that our lovely apartment is infested with cockroaches. They sneak up through the drains at night time and crawl over our toothbrushes and cutlery, leaving the occasional deposit behind to let us know they have been here. These aren't tiny little bugs either. They're the Asian cousins of the enormous roaches we used to see in Africa. Delightful... I don't really know why God created them...




Another negative we've been faced with also pertains to the local wildlife. The campus where Keegan attends school has thousands of mosquitoes. We spray our exposed skin every morning, but still we get bitten. I've noticed that some students wear a special sticker on their clothing to repel the mozzies. I'll look out for it at the supermarket next time I go. Look at how many bites the kids have on their legs!


I'm thankful that at least these mozzies don't spread malaria.



As I was preparing a casserole for dinner tonight, I opened the tin of tuna and automatically looked around for our cat Bronte to come running. Then I remembered with more than just a twinge of sadness that we had left her behind in Australia in the safe care of the Adams family. Those of you readers who aren't cat-lovers won't understand how hard it was for me to give up our dear pet of twelve years. Anyway, here's a photo of our kids saying their final good-bye to Bronte.










Tonight Tirzah was playing in the hallway and had a bad fall. She now has a huge lump and bruise on her forehead which you can't really see in the photo below but in which she looks mighty cute, so I thought I'd post it anyway.

So there you have it...

Hopefully tomorrow will be a happier day...