Our Little House on the 25th Floor

Here is a peek at our apartment on the 25th floor. Most cities in this part of the world are vertical. Everywhere you look there are massive buildings looming overhead that make you feel like an ant.

The neighbourhood

Apartment shopping was fun. We had all of one day to find and move into an apartment. It starts out with us going into an apartment rental office (there's one on every street corner) and giving our ballpark rental figure. We are then escorted around the neighborhood by two men in black suits with name tags (think mormons on mission). If you don't like what they have to offer, then you try another office. After looking at about 12 apartments, we picked the nicest one and met the landlords for the negotiating. We had a translator from our school with us, and spent 90% of the time sitting there wondering what was going on. When we questioned our translator over some of the details of the negotiation, our landlords piped up in decent English. Who knew? After everything is decided on, we sign, stamp and fingerprint a thousand papers all in Chinese, and hope that we are not agreeing to sell off our first born child. It actually worked out well for us, and we have great landlords. We moved in the same day and got back to the apartment to find our landlord's whole extended family scrubbing away to get it ready for us. And they insisted that they take us out for dinner to welcome us to China. Nice, nice people.

This is the view from our apartment if you look directly down.

We've got quite a nice private park in front of us, where the elderly gather to do Tai Chi in the mornings and parade their grand babies around in the afternoons (my favorite moments of the day here!). This is also the only place I have found where my feet can walk over a tiny patch of grass and sigh. the grass

As you can see (2 pictures up) we have a swimming pool (which closed for winter right after we moved in, even though it was scorching hot, and has yet to reopen for summer, even though it is once again scorching hot). Instead it has done a fantastic job of breeding mosquitoes! But it looks pretty. There is also a tennis court, which we have yet to play on for similar reasons. But the park is great, and comes complete with very fun exercise equipment, ping pong tables and gold fish ponds.









Here is the view from our apartment windows.

By day #1

By day #2

By night

The apartments here are furnished when you rent them. Ours is a little sparse as we are the first to live here, but we have seen some that are beautifully decorated. The bonus for us was that we got to pick out the mattresses for the beds. Mattresses are notoriously hard around here (think rock, or tile floor) so we were happy about that. Mattress shopping went like this. Landlord takes us out in his fancy dancy car to a mattress store. He says, "pick one." We lie down on a few, find the softest and say "we want that one." We drive back to the apartment and half an hour later a man rides up on a bicycle, a bicycle(!) with two double mattresses strapped on behind him. Voila! It was a bit like a magic trick.

living room

Bedroom #1

Bedroom #2

Our kitchen. If it look small that is because it is.
It's exactly as big as this picture makes it out to be plus a fridge on the end.

Balcony off the kitchen for a washing machine.

Bathroom - this sink seems to follow us around the world

Dining room/Entrance

So that's our apartment. Not much else to say about that. It's a good place. We have a few nice neighbours and an office on our floor. Yes, an office. This is a common thing in China. From the outside, it looks just like someone's apartment, but when the door opens you see pink cubicles and row after row of neatly attired women clicking away on a keyboard. We don't know what they do, but it looks rather boring. I'm hoping a dvd shop opens up next door. Or maybe an Indian restaurant.