Our apartment building--we're on the 4th floor on the right.
(Do you see Grace and Dave?)
We moved into our apartment Sunday. It wasn’t a terribly difficult move since the “foreign expert” building is attached to the Education Hotel. If you look at the picture of the E. H. in the previous post, imagine you can see off to the left, facing it. That’s where our building is. And no, I still don’t have an address. I don’t even know the name of our street. Well, I can say that we are on the 4th floor, on the east side of the building. Our windows are on the north side and the south side, which is terrific.
So, picture in your mind a backwards “L” shaped apartment. It’s a really small one-bedroom apartment. You enter the apartment in the corner between the short and long legs, which opens onto the living room. To the left of the living room, at the top of the long leg, are the kitchen and the bathroom. The kitchen has a small new refrigerator, a propane 2-plate hot plate on top of what looks like a desk, a very small sink with only cold water, and a tiny metal cabinet next to it, shorter than the sink.
The Kitchen
The bathroom has a toilet, a pedestal sink, a funky washing machine, and a shower head. There is a drain in the corner of the bathroom, into which the washing machine dumps its water and where the shower water goes.
The Bathroom
(I'm preparing to do dishes--still in my pajamas.)
The living room has a couch, an armchair, a bookcase, and a desk with a big TV on it. The short leg of the “L” has the room I’m sitting in now, which isn’t really separate from the living room. It has the kids’ two beds and another desk.
Grace is crashed out; Samuel is homesick and pouting.
Off from the desk are the windows which face south and a door which opens onto the balcony, where the drying lines are.
Our bedroom is through another door, closer to the living room. There’s a double bed, another armchair, a sort of vanity, and a big wardrobe (think The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe). And windows also facing south, at the head of our bed.
All in all it’s a pretty cozy place. It is definitely much smaller than we’re used to, and as it has been really hot and more humid than at home, it feels sometimes really really small and close. There is no air conditioner and we don’t have a fan. We keep wondering if it is worth the investment to get a fan, since it will soon start cooling down. At least, at this point we hope it’ll cool down sometime soon. Of course, we have started hearing about how cold it gets here in the winter, and we don’t want that to come too soon. It’s the proverbial rock and a hard place.
The craziest thing about the place is what I need to do in order to wash the dishes or do the laundry. I know, you’re probably still stuck on, “Wait, only a shower head???”, but believe me, that is the least of my problems here. In order to do dishes I must take my little plastic tub, complete with cartoon characters on the inside bottom (these are ubiquitous here), into the bathroom, where I put it on the floor, grab the shower head, and turn it on to hot. Hot here is not hot at home. We’re talking steam coming out of the shower head, scalding hot. I spray water into my plastic tub which already has my soap, then I lug it into the kitchen. I do the dishes on the floor because there is no counter space. They get rinsed in the sink, and then laid out on top of the little metal cabinet I mentioned.
And doing the laundry?? It’s not beating clothes on the rocks but really sometimes I feel like it’s a close second. I open up the left side of the machine (which looks a little like a small cabinet), pour in some laundry soap, take the same handy dandy shower head, and fill it up to the level I want. Now, I would actually like the level to be very high, but the capacity is practically nil and I can only wash about 8-10 articles of clothing at a time. I put the lid on, turn the dial to 15 and let it agitate for 15 minutes. Then I turn the dial again for another 15. Once the “wash” is done, I unhook the hose on the side, place said hose next to the drain (remember?), and turn another dial which makes all the water come out of the machine. I hook the hose back up, turn the dial back to wash, and fill the tub up again with water, hoping to get some kind of rinse going. 15-30 minutes later, the rinse is done, and I drain the tub yet again. (Are you sensing yet the general fatigue I am feeling by this point? Multiply by 4 or 5 times per day since Sunday and you will understand why I am fixating on this. We had two garbage bags full of dirty clothes by the time we moved in. I started laundry on Sunday and will finish those 2 bags tomorrow morning with one last load.) Okay, sorry for the aside… Anyway, once the rinse water is drained, I pull out the clothes and put them in the smaller tub on the right side. Turn the dial to 5, wait (yes, no surprise) 5 minutes, and the clothes have been spun like crazy and are now ready to be hung up. Remember when I waxed poetic about my laundry line oh so many weeks ago? This doesn’t quite have the same romance about it. But to be fair, being as hot as it is, and given how long it takes to do a load, my clothes are nearly dry by the time the next load needs to go up.
What else can I say about the place? The road outside is nearly always busy with horns and many many people walking and talking, and tractors, and cars, and car alarms, and fireworks every night (Samuel says, “Just because they invented fireworks, does that mean they have to set them off every night?” Good question. But it probably has to do with either the 60th anniversary of the founding of the autonomous region of
And lastly but most certainly not least, I found my very first cockroach in the bathroom this morning. What kind of adventure would we have if we didn’t have those little critters here, too?
By the way, this last picture is just too good not to put in, because it completely horrified all my bourgeois sensibilities and it took a lot for me to even walk into the kitchen. Last weekend when we moved in, a lot of people were moving out of the apartments--at least, I hope this is the reason for the insanely huge pile of garbage that I found directly below my kitchen window, albeit four flights down. The smell was intense and I was afraid it was a normal affair. Monday morning, however, I found Mrs. Hu (the manager of the building and all around incredible woman for getting everything done) and a couple of helpers sorting through every single trash bag and separating bottles and cans from food garbage. Not even a rubber glove to be seen. Mrs. Hu is way more a woman than I'll ever be.
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