Worst Kept Secrets

It’s been a pretty eventful week. We got a surprise three day weekend, and decided that if we wanted to move off campus, it would pretty much be our only chance to do it. And we REALLY wanted to get off campus. I don’t recommend living five floors above your office and two above your classrooms. You know that feeling of relief you get when you get home from work? It’s an important, sanity-saving feeling, and I’ve been missing it.

Surprisingly, finding an apartment in China isn’t horribly difficult (as long as you’ve got a Chinese speaker to help you). For us, it was a matter of finding someone to translate and walking around the block and into a real estate agent’s office. We told her that we wanted a two bedroom place in the neighborhood and gave her our price range. She had just the thing, although unfortunately she had left the key in her other pants. So we arranged a time to come back and look at it. Then we met up with a student whose parents were looking to rent out an apartment. It was a decent place, with fun 1970s furniture and a lot of space, but one of the rooms was to remain locked and contained the family’s things, and there was also no washing machine or refridgerator. It was also located in the middle of what appeared to be a retirement community, and I’m not quite prepared to grow old in China at the age of twenty-five.

Then we went back to the real estate agent, and walked for about eight minutes until we arrived at the building I now live in. It was pretty much an instant sell - it was clean, convenient, and had everything we needed. Plus, our landlord is the sweetest human being alive. He’s a graduate architecture student who speaks a little bit of English, offered to let us pay our deposit whenever we had the money (which seems unheard of coming from a landlord), helped us get internet set up, and introduced us to his wife, who brought us flowers. He’s also handling all of our bills, so instead of messing with the electric company or anyone else, we just pay him (I think this is a standard arrangement, but it’s still deliciously hassle-free).

Things that I like: the weird blue lighting in our hallway. Our bathroom sink. Our enclosed balcony with a SWEET laundry system. There are two bars that operate on a pulley, so you hang up your clothes and then turn a crank to get them out of the way.

When I first saw the bathroom, I had it marked as something that was going to be a problem:

That metal thing coming out of the wall is the shower, and that silver thing on the floor is the drain. The faucet is almost directly above the toilet. However, it’s actually a really nice shower, if you think of it as a shower with a toilet in it, rather than a bathroom with a shower in it. And it’s got heat lamps that dry the floor reasonably quickly. End of story: I get a nice hot shower with excellent water pressure, and my bathroom floor is always clean. And the bathroom sink is gorgeous.

The kitchen’s very small, but there’s plenty of room for one person to cook delicious home-cooked meals (oh good grief, of course I’m not talking about ME - I’ve changed since I moved here, but not that much).

I was also worried that I’d hate having to walk to work every single day, but so far, I’m really loving it. It’s a short walk - just long enough to give me time to wake up and clear my head before I walk into class. And I like my neighborhood. I like passing the playground equipment that I never see children using - only the elderly placidly twisting through gentle exercises. Then there’s a round-about which is almost entirely COVERED in watermelons for sale, a toy store that only sells Transformers (although I guess there were exactly seven Hello Kitty figurines in there when I checked), little street food stalls, a market, and that pretty much brings me to my school.

So, end of story, I’m happy, Chris is happy, and as far as I can tell, Chris’s cat Scout is THRILLED. She’s got so many rooms to explore and run around in, as opposed to the school’s dormitory, which was, well, a dorm room with a sink. Our only woe right now is that we don’t have a couch, only one red one-person chair. We’re working on it. I feel like I’m living in grown-up China now, and it’s a huge feeling of liberation. And have I mentioned that it’s nice to not live where I work any more?

Anyway, on the off-chance that someone finds this interesting, I’ll post some more pictures when we’ve got it set up to our satisfaction. Some of our friends came over to have a look today, and they brought us a traditional Chinese good luck present - a ridiculously charismatic cricket in a little wicker cage.

He was such a beautiful little guy, and I had a name picked out and terrarium plans made (never mind that I used to feed a very similar animal to my pet tarantula on a weekly basis with no remorse), but I finally decided that I really didn’t need to fall in love with something with such a likely early mortality, and after we thought he’d shed as much good luck as he was likely to, we let him go in a tree outside. So far, my only Chinese pet remains the cactus sitting on my desk, whose name is Eustatius.

There are a few other apartment pictures in my flickr account, and I’ll try to put more up soon. Also, Chris really went the extra mile and made a video tour, here. I feel that I should note that there will not be any broken necks, I promise - we have flashlights and we know how to walk up and down stairs.

The other hilarious news: last night, Chris and I were asked to audition for a recording company looking for English speakers for a textbook CD. And we NAILED it. So now I’ll be the voice that Chinese students learn to hate. I’m going to set up recording times tomorrow, and we’ll see how it goes.