Children

Hi All, I would be grateful for any tips and info on coming to HK for a short visit with a toddler.

I am planning a family trip (3 adults and 1 20-month old toddler) to HK in October. It's only a short stay of one week.

I am trying to find a 2-3 bedroom furnished apartment, but most serviced apartment places require a 1-month minimum. The only place I can find so far is Olympic Terrace. Does anyone know anywhere else? I have looked on moveandstay.com and no luck there at this stage.

The Family Tall went out for our first hike of the 2007-08 season last Saturday morning, and in the flurry of preparations required for hiking with a five-year-old, I was reminded of both how easy it is to get out on Hong Kong’s hiking trails, but also of why it’s just enough trouble that surprisingly few people actually do it.

So my purpose today is to try to pass along a few tips that might make it more feasible to get out and about on family hikes in Hong Kong. Longer, more ambitious hikes for all grown-ups we’ll leave for other times.

This time last year we were taking MissB along to kindergarten interviews. She’s just finishing her first term, and I'm pleased to report it's turned out really well. But though we're happy with our choice, it seems noone else is!

If you're an expat with a young family, taking them on long journeys back home is a part of life. In our case it's a 12-hour flight to the UK, then a 4-hour drive in a hire car to my hometown. Here are a couple of things that helped on this year's trip...

The boundless energy of a young child combined with the small size of a typical Hong Kong flat means you'll soon be looking for somewhere to take them out. Miss B Sr. is now two years and nine months, and lists her current favourites as:

If having a baby is difficult, sometimes choosing their name seems even harder. And when you've got two cultures & languages in the mix, things get even more complicated.

Choosing the English names for our two daughters has been my job, with MrsB holding the power of veto. The first time around, before we knew the baby's sex, I was suggesting "Huw" if it was a boy. It's a friend's name, and has a link to Wales where I'm from. "No!" says MrsB, "any Chinese person that hears you call his name will think you're swearing at him". Lucky it was a girl...

We had another interview on a recent Saturday, this time at a popular kindergarten in mid-levels. The style was different again, but left us feeling even more convinced that kindergarten #3 mentioned in the previous article was the right choice for us. Then on Monday we received a letter saying that #3 had accepted MsB, so all is well with the world. Still, this brush with the interviewing process has opened my eyes to a business opportunity…

There are books on sale that list kindergartens, neatly tabulating their staff-pupil ratios, monthly fees, etc. I’m thinking of releasing a new version of the booklet with some extra columns, including:

1 Do try to arrive right at the opening, and go deep into the park immediately to take a couple of the rides you're really looking forward to. This is standard advice for amusement parks, but it really paid off for us, as a couple of the Fantasyland rides we walked right onto first thing in the morning had hour-long queues just a little later.

Mrs Tall and I are pathetically weak. Daughter Tall had just learned that familiar-to-all-parents whine that goes:

Iwannagotodisneyland Iwannagotodisneyland Iwannagotodisneyland

[biiiiig breath]

Iwannagotodisneyland . . .

So we caved right in and took her.

As Mr Tall notes, we're currently making our choice of kindergarten for MissB. Yes, it's interview time.

When I first heard about the concept of interviews for kindergartens, I filed it away under the category of amusing stories to tell visitors, and left it at that. Several years later and we're in the thick of it. It turns out that the term "interview" is pretty broad, and the three we've been to have all been very different.

Interviewing through the language barrier

The first interview was at the kindergarten we'd visited previously for their open-day .