or: Where to Next?

My Long Service Leave from Asia has been an enlightening experience in many ways. It has given me an opportunity to reflect on what I like about living in HK what I like about living elsewhere and where else I could possibly live.

It’s given me the opportunity to reflect on quite a few other things too but that’s now what I feel like writing about at the moment.

This has also been prompted by a few people lately saying they don’t think I will move back to HK to live.

While I think I could live in a lot of different places, like the older area of Florence, there are various reasons why it may not be the best option. While I enjoy the creativity of this place, it doesn’t meet much of the rest of my current criteria.

At the outset, I would like to say, I haven’t decided anything yet. As a reminder, I didn’t know I was going to have Long Service Leave from Asia until November last year so where I live in the future doesn’t need to be decided in a hurry either.

I digress…

There are roughly 974 things I like about living in HK. These include (and in no particular order and not exhaustive):

• there is no excuse for boredom. Thanks to the numerous reservoirs, HK has 70% national park / lands that are unable to be built on, making the outdoors easily accessible. The other 30% is both residential, businesses and various institutions in which to be entertained such as theatres, opera, movie cinemas. Yet still, my nose is often found in a book… often outside.
• the food. It is no surprise, I like the local food and I also like the variety of other foods that are able to be bought. More recently, organic food is finally making more of an appearance though it is still expensive. 
• the people. I have been fortunate to meet many interesting and fun people, some who have stayed in my life and some who have moved on. It is an easy place to meet new people and make new friends due to it being quite transient. 
• the buzz. Having 7 million people living and working in fairly close proximity and all seemingly in a hurry, there is buzz in the air that can border on frantic at times. It is also important to escape this regularly as it can also cause burnout.
• the skyline. It is not possible for me to tire of looking at the skyline. At night, the coloured lights on the buildings shimmering on either side of the Harbour outline the buildings as well as those still at work. During the day, the variety of building styles is easier to see.
• the technology. It’s fairly cheap compared to Australia and tend to have a lot of it before any other place.
• entrepreneurial. People look for ways to make money and it’s fairly easy to set up a business. Sourcing products from China is also common though there is a need to have a good quality assurance process in place. This attitude also adds to the buzz of the place.
• the tax rate. A sliding scale that reaches 17%.
• public transport. It is efficient, on time and ridiculously cheap compared to most first world countries. Checking in for the airport in town or at Kowloon and being able to send my luggage ahead, go to work for the day, then hop on the Airport Express to fly later in the day.
• accessibility. Traveling out of HK to just about anywhere in the world is relatively easy. Traveling out of Australia tends to take an additional day.

There are a few things that I don’t like about living in HK. These include (in no particular order and fairly exhaustive):

• the pollution. HK is not known for having clean skies all year. They have a tendency to blame China, which is partly to blame for some of it, however, recycling, reusing, refusing is not common practice. Nor is turning off engines when cars aren’t going anywhere, not leaving aircon on 24/7. It is also the lighting of the skyline though the lights now are turned off at a set time. I don’t dive in HK as I’m convinced all I will see (if there is any visibility at all) is plastic bags drifting along, and the occasional concrete boots, rusty bicycles and perhaps a jelly fish.
• shark fin soup, manta rays, ivory etc – there is still a general acceptance that all of these things are ok. I am not saying everyone thinks like this. There is enough of a demand that supply still exists. There is a general lack of knowledge about how these items came to be where they are, the suffering of the animals involved and that it is all actually illegal yet there is not really a local crackdown on this. There is a focus on large scale importing though. Focusing on individual sellers is also unlikely to work and would more likely create a larger blackmarket. More education to stop the demand in the first place could work.
• the humidity. I have curly hair except in HK. There I have frizzy hair. Some times of the year, I can walk out of my place, wearing a skirt and a shirt for work, wait at the bus stop and before it comes, my shirt is stuck to my back and begins to sticking to my front. The freezing temperature of the minibus aircon dries my shirt by the time I arrive to work.
• lack of social welfare for the elderly or long-term sick. I am saddened watching old women, hunched over, pulling or pushing carts of neatly folded cardboard boxes up and down hills, in all sorts of weather to take for recycling and earn some cash. There are also quite a few people that sleep under bridges. With accommodation being so expensive and the family units changing, there are quite a few people falling through the cracks.
• the beaches. This is also pollution related as the beaches themselves are ok, not great, but ok. Except on Lantau and some of those beaches are awesome – they stretch for kilometres and are generally fairly clean though I have seen a couch washed up at Cheung Sha with a watermelon floating nearby. Yes, watermelon float.

So where else could I possibly live? It’s an interesting question so I’ve been thinking about the criteria based on the above, what I’ve enjoyed in my travels and the same kind of list that I have for Australia and Japan since they are the only other places I have a good memory of living.

My non-exhaustive, no-particular order criteria is as follows:

• tropical. I like the warm weather and am not so good in the cold. I don’t mind going skiing though to live somewhere it snows is not for me. Palm trees and snow are not a match made in heaven.
• food. It has to have a variety of good food. I don’t mean an abundance of fine dining places though they are nice to go to on occasion, I mean good quality, fresh produce and standard types of restaurants to go to for meals that don’t cost a billion trillion of whatever currency that country uses.
• accessibility. I have been spoilt being in HK on this front so the next place doesn’t have to be quite so easy to get to everywhere, it just has to be easy to get to a few other countries that I haven’t been to before. 
• beaches. This goes with tropical but I figure I should keep this as a separate criteria. It also means there will be coconuts and papaya / pawpaw which also fits nicely into the food category too. 
• people. It needs to be a foreigner-friendly location. I accept that not everyone likes having foreigners living and working in their country but if this is a large portion of the population, I would rather live elsewhere. Based on prior experience, I think I’ll be able to find some fun and interesting people wherever I am though Japan was a little more of a challenge and took longer to do this than in any other city or country I have been in. People from tropical environments tend to value different things to those from more city related areas. They tend to be better at balancing work and play than others. This is a massive generalisation but you get the idea.
• diving. I have dived quite a bit this year and want to do more of it and more regularly. This means it has to be accessible and the ocean needs to be fairly pollution free.
• outdoor lifestyle. It’s no secret, I like to be outside. I like to run, read, picnic, bbq and explore. Yes, reading is an inside activity but there is no reason to confine it there. I’d like a place that has a variety of landscapes so I can see different things, different wildlife etc.
• a concern for the environment. I would like to be in a place that is trying to improve its impact on the environment. I’m not sure exactly how I would find this out or if I could be a part of improving this. It’s been baby steps in HK, perhaps it will be baby steps elsewhere. 
• culture. Somewhere that is different to what I’m familiar with so I can learn how and why other people do what they do and when they do it. I enjoy the difference. 
• low tax rate yet some social welfare. I may be asking for a miracle with this one but I figure I should put the idea out there and see what happens as part of my research.

So what does this all mean?

Nothing.

I’m toying with possibilities.

Exploring options.

* Thanks to Jack Johnson for the title to this post.