How to be homeless in Hong Kong

Two days of staying in the nice hostel really did me in, in the pocketbook area. I still have lots of US cash but I have to make it last. I don’t want to have to ask my parents for more money, and I don’t get paid until the end of the month.
I woke up the second day with the grim realization that I had to go back to the Kowloon hostel.
It was not quite a horrifying revelation “like the girl in The Silence of the Lambs when she woke up in a well” (WB); it was tempered with the maturity of experience and the braced discipline of a battle-hardened survivor.

I packed up my one suitcase and went back to the $6.99/night hostel.

I stayed there for a week.

I made it out alive.

I think that will suffice.

*For the curious reader:
While I stayed in that hostel, I tried to negotiate a discounted weekly rate. After all, something like this shouldn’t even be worth $6.99/night. Plus, the exchange rate they were using was kind of fucking me over. For one week, they said they would charge me the “special” rate of HK$60/night, which is more like US$8. But I noticed that that's what they charge any rando for one night in the dorms, so I decided I would pay on a night-by-night basis. One night I came back fairly late and no one asked me for money. I thought I would try to see how many nights I could get away with this.
Before long they caught onto me. I would fall asleep around 10pm to try to elude them through unconsciousness, and they would come to my bunk bed, tap me on the shoulder, and hold out an empty palm.
I decided to be legit and cough up the cash. But let the record show that this hostel is not legit at all.

On the Hong Kong version of Craigslist, I found a New Zealander (a kiwi, as he called himself) looking for flat-mates. It seemed like a reasonable price--US$300 a month. Due to the paucity of reasonable housing in HK, I had been mentally preparing myself for staying in the hostel for the entire summer, and at US$6.99/night that would be about US$210 a month, and after trying to negotiate with these hustlers, maybe a little less than $200 a month. (Unfortunately demand for budget accommodations is high, so I couldn’t really cite high vacancy as a bargaining chip with these people.) Paying the extra $100 for my own place seemed worthwhile.

While waiting for the apartment-share to start, I stayed with a nice co-worker for two nights. After hearing from me that I had slept one night in the office because I was so homeless, she had offered to host me on destitute nights (so, one night after clubbing with bankers, I left the nightlife district Lan Kwai Fong at 2:30AM, after the subway had closed and I thought it would be too late to check into the hostel and didn’t want to pay for the cab ride there, so I walked to my office and slept on the floor underneath my desk). I decided to take her up on her offer. She mentioned that she had a couch that I could sleep on.

I went to her apartment, and it was small but cute. Then I saw the “couch.”
It was really a small loveseat.
It was okay, though. Her bathroom was clean and white and there was no mold in the grout between the tiles. That was worth the world to me.

In the middle of the night I woke up and decided to try a more comfortable position—lying down on the floor. At least that way I would be able to spread all of my limbs in a natural way.

The floor didn’t work out well. I moved back to the loveseat.

“It’s nice to have a bed,” I thought to myself in the dark. How I have taken that for granted for the past 22 years.

But after that, it was July 1, and the lease for the apartment began! For the last time for the next two months (hopefully), I packed up my one suitcase and set out to try my fortunes with two strangers I met on HK craigslist.

So that’s the story of how I moved into a real apartment, and am now living much more happily, without imposing on anyone, with a modicum of privacy, at a reasonable price that won’t preclude me from buying food or living with a medium to high quality of life.