New Apartment

Ashlee and I woke up this morning to meet Mei as she was going to help us move into our new apartment. For those of you that have been reading blog, you know that we have been living in the penthouse apartment with four other teachers from our school. This apartment is amazing and everything is brand new. Mei met us at the penthouse at ten am to help us cope with our excessive amount of baggage as I am sure you read about in the earlier posts. We of course needed two taxi’s to carry this large amount of baggage to our new place.

I took a cab by myself and the driver of course did not know exactly where the apartment was...which entailed the driver asking me to help clarify...which of course didn’t work as I don’t speak mandarin. After asking a few people on the street the driver was able to find the correct unit. I was always told not to judge a chinese property by the condition of the outside of the building. So as we pulled up to the building I kept my negative comments to myself. Ashlee and Mei arrived shortly after. We wrestled the the baggage into the building and each group took an elevator up to the 18th floor. For anyone that knows Ashlee, you know that if there is one thing she doesn't like, it would be elevators. We all survived the elevator ride and went to our apartment door. After unlocking the first door, which I think might have been taken out of a submarine (a huge steel door) we entered the apartment.

Our first glance into the apartment was not one of happiness but I guess you could say it was one of amazement. We were amazed at the DUMP that the school was saying was our apartment. The apartment enters into the living room which was composed of two leather couches, a coffee table that came with left over finger nail trimmers among other great gifts, and a rats nest/yard sale/cluster of cables which was the tv/dvd player/etc. The first thing we noticed was that out of the 10 or so light bulbs in the living room (the chinese love having tons of lights, each room tends to have like 6 light switches) only 2 of the bulbs worked. Welcome to the bat cave. We proceeded further into the apartment...the light situation was the same for the small dining room area and for the kitchen. We had a nice broken washing machine sitting in the corner, which we “were supposed to just ignore because it’s broken” and the new washing machine was put into the tiny bathroom. This presented its own unique problem as I cannot sit on the toilet as the washing machine takes up most of the bathroom.

The next rooms did not show any improvement. Both bedrooms contained old linens from the previous tenant (which we found out was not a model person). The kitchen was also quite a disappointment, the stove didn’t work and all the dishes were put back in the makeshift drawer but were not cleaned. The apartment on a whole was not clean at all. It looked as if it hadn’t been touched in months. Mei left Ashlee and I as she had to go to work. We didn’t even want to sit on anything as everything looked so dirty and disgusting. I called another student that used to live in the same building to see if this was “normal” for school provided housing. He assured us that, no, it was not normal for the apartment to be that dirty but the age of the apartment was nothing out of the norm. I the contacted the director of the schools for Hangzhou and I am sure she could hear the disappointment in my voice. She happened to be in the area and decided to come over and take a look at the apartment. She came in and made a few calls and told us that they would attempt to correct the problems. Two ladies from the school came over and began to check over the apartment. They started calling some maintenance people to come and check over some of the parts of the apartment. The attempted to fix the heater in the one bedroom but that was a lost cause. Heaters are quite necessary during this time of year in the city as it gets down to the low 30’s and the apartments in China have zero to no insulation.

Ashlee and I decided to get out of the apartment for a bit and went to the store with the director of the schools. We spent a bit of time shopping and staring at the weird things that were for sale in the store. (I will save that dicussion for a future blog post). We grabbed a bite to eat and headed back to the apartment, by this time it was starting to get dark. And this is were the fun began with the apartment. The CRITTERS started coming out of the woodwork, literally I am not talking about a few critters here and there I am talking about several bugs that appeared all over the walls and the floors. The bugs include cockroaches, some type of little black bug, among others. Nothing like the bugs making an appearance to welcome Ashlee and I to China. After crunching bugs for a few hours we decided to go to dinner with some friends. Upon our return to the apartment the bugs were waiting up for us to make sure that we made it home ok! We contacted Mei the next morning and she came over with some Chinese bug spray, which I can only imagine is the strongest and made of the worst chemicals in the world. I turned into the Orkin man for about 30 minutes and sprayed the heck out of the apartment. Only time would tell if the spray worked, as Ashlee and I anxiously awaited the next night to see if our friends would be joining us. And join us they did, plan B, Mei gave us some cockroach pellets to put out.

Ashlee and I had had enough of the bugs by this time and put in a request to find our own housing. The apartment search would start ASAP. But for the time being it was going to be us and the bugs.

To check out some pictures go to: Old Apartment