cost of living

One thing that has been at the back of my mind since I have been here is the whole situation of day to day expenditures. Coming here from New York there are many day to items seem soo cheap, for example furniture at IKEA (the one place, I shit you not, I have visited more often than the grocery/corner store - you've got to check out the cloth covered lamps that I got... if I ever get around to taking photographs of my place that is). Anyway, even though I may have thought that IKEA was relatively cheap - I just found out that I could get customized furniture made out of better materials at similar prices, my point being that its pretty hard to judge weather you are getting a good deal when you initally arrive in a completely different environment. Now I feel as though I've been ripped off a number of times but at the time of purchase I thought that everything was hunky dorey, its just that at the time I was comparing their relative prices to what it would be in the US.

For example, I used to pay no attention to the Starbucks lattes that I bought (HKD 30 ~ 3.5 USD), but thats how mych I normally pay on an average lunch - its slowly starting to look a bit expensive.. forget the occasional indian curry lunch I used to crave from La Fountaine which set me back HKD 100. After being around for a while I've started to gain a sense of the place... This is the closest I've come to admitting that I'm starting to fit in here, its a scary step.

Though price differences between here and the US seem tiny compared to the price differences in India, where my friend Hemant has been tracking prices from his move from Seattle to Bangalore.

In other news, I've recovered from a 16 km run in the hills of the new terretories that I did this weekend and I somehow feel that I'm getting more fit. I'm hanging out with these Australians more often, I really didn't expect when I was told that Aussies were a bunch of meat heads who liked to play sports that it would turn out to be true. Note: No real insult is intended, but it was a person from Oz who made the generalization (Ray Mcgregor)