The apartment is smaller than you have been told
Everyone warns you that Hong Kong flats are small. What they do not convey is that the number you were quoted, say two hundred and twenty square feet, includes the bathroom, and that the bathroom and the shower are frequently the same room, with a drain in the floor and no partition. Your towel will never fully dry between September and November. This is not a defect in your building. It is the humidity, and it is universal.
Budget for a dehumidifier in the first week. Not as a comfort purchase, but as the thing that stops mould appearing on the leather of your shoes, which it otherwise will, within about three weeks.
The transit is so good it distorts your sense of distance
The Octopus card works on the MTR, buses, trams, ferries, convenience stores, and most fast food. Trains run every two to three minutes. The practical consequence is that you stop understanding how far apart things are, because everything is twenty-five minutes.
Then you try to go somewhere in the New Territories on a Sunday, or take the ferry to an outlying island, and the illusion breaks in a useful way. Do that early in the semester. Hong Kong is about seventy-five percent country park by land area, a fact the skyline photographs work hard to hide, and the hiking is genuinely world-class. Dragon’s Back is the famous one. Go anyway, but go at seven in the morning.
Food is cheap until it abruptly is not
A bowl of wonton noodles in a shop with fluorescent lighting and shared tables costs around forty Hong Kong dollars and is one of the best things you will eat all semester. A cocktail in Central costs a hundred and forty. Both are true at once, in the same square mile, and the budget you brought assumed an average that does not exist.
The students who run out of money in month three are almost never the ones who ate badly. They are the ones who said yes to every rooftop.
The visa admin is real work
Your student visa arrives through your host university, but the Hong Kong ID card is a separate appointment at the Immigration Tower that you book yourself, and the slots go fast at the start of term. Book it before you fly if the system lets you. Without the ID card, opening a local bank account is slow, and without a local account you are paying foreign transaction fees on four months of daily spending.
None of this is difficult. All of it takes longer than the two weeks you mentally allocated, and it happens during the same fortnight you are trying to register for courses.
What actually stays with you
Not the harbour. The ferry, maybe: the Star Ferry costs about five dollars and crosses in eight minutes and never stops being worth it. But mostly the ordinary parts: the wet market two streets from your building, the ambient noise of an air conditioning unit outside every window, the fact that you can be on a ridgeline with no buildings in sight forty minutes after leaving a tower block.
The brochure sells you the skyline. You will spend four months underneath it, which is a different thing entirely, and better.