Getting Settled

Getting Settled

When we first to China we were housed for the first two weeks in on campus housing in a traditional dormitory style setting. We had no intention of staying in this arrangement however it worked until we could find somewhere to live. Thus we began our process of walking around the city of Beijing trying to find somewhere to live. There aren’t traditional apartment complexes here like you would find in the states. So you end up working with a real estate agent that helps you find a place for rent. We worked with three different agents over the course of about a week and must have seen 10 different apartments over the week. In order to look at these apartments we logged miles and miles of walking in the coldest winter Beijing has seen in decades. We worked with one agent in particular that stands out in my mind his name is “Pat.”

Pat asks us to meet him at 5 o’clock one evening about a block from a subway stop and he’ll show us a few apartments in the area. We tried to meet Pat where he had asked but couldn’t find it so out of frustration and frozen hands, feet, and faces we jumped inside of a mall called him up and said come find us. About 15 minutes later Pat shows up on his moped wearing an army green winter coat that comes down to about his knees, ear muffs, and over his pants are leather knee length “chaps” to keep his legs from freezing off while riding his moped around in the -12 degree (Fahrenheit) weather, Pat is fairly tall by Chinese standards probably around 5’10” wears glasses and is probably in his early 40’s with a full head of hair (that’s one thing I’ve notice not many bald guys here). We walk out of the mall to meet him at his moped when a gust of wind blows his moped over and into the street. Pat takes off after his moped into the street and is now standing in the road trying to stand his ride up on a patch of ice (it had snowed a few days prior and there is snow and ice everywhere) slipping and sliding back and forth with no regard for his own life after what seems like 5 minutes of the struggle Pat’s moped is vertical and ready to ride. Pat stumbles back over to us, points east and mumbles among other things “even erliven,” I look at Ted and Dirk (my roommates) and say “WHAT?” Dirk has the same look of confusion on his face as that I have and Ted seems to know exactly what Pat’s talking about.

Next thing I know we are walking for about 15 minutes through the -12 degree gusting wind streets of Beijing until we see Pat standing in front of the 7-11. We get within about 5 feet of him and he jumps back on his moped and shoots down a side street where he parks outside of a classic Chinese apartment building. There is an narrow iron gate with two Chinese Flags waving from the top of the gate we have to step up and through the gate where we are met by one of Pat’s friends or coworkers be honest we never figured out who he was or why he was with us. We walk into a dimly lit building with narrow halls and Pat’s little friend in tow (he is about 5 feet tall weighs maybe 140 pounds and a good bit younger than Pat probably late 20’s or early 30’s), all of a sudden little Pat starts throwing what appears to be at first a temper tantrum jumping up and down arms clapping against his body and suddenly he STOPS and we continue walking. Dirk and I are looking at each other wondering what in the world we’ve gotten ourselves into until Ted tells us that the lights were activated by the Chinese Clapper and so little Pat was making noise to get the lights to turn on.

We walk into the first apartment that Pat show’s us (he showed us three but this one pretty much sums up our experiences with Pat) where Pat knocks on the door of the apartment and waits for someone to answer the door. I look at Ted and say “Is someone living here? He knows we need a place ASAP right?” Ted says something to Pat in Chinese and tells me, “its ok.” A couple of seconds later a middle aged Chinese woman opens the door to her house and we are handed bags to put over our shoes so we don’t make the floors dirty. We walk into the apartment which opens up into the living room/kitchen area to find our hosts husband sitting on the couch watching a Chinese sitcom on T.V. he stands up and greets us with a Ni Hao and we proceed to move off to the room to the right of the living room/kitchen which is the downstairs bathroom connected to the downstairs bedroom where we find the happy couples teenaged son looking at all of his board games still in their original packaging neatly placed on the enclosed bookshelf next to his bed (for those of you who have seen the movie “The 40 Year Old Virgin” it was like looking at the Asian version). I walk into the room to check it out and he gets up and walks into his closet I don’t know but he walked into the closet and closed the closet door I decided it was time to go upstairs.

There is a narrow spiral staircase in the living room/kitchen that leads upstairs to a loft area and the rest of the apartment. The loft area is small but nice and overlooks the living room. Off the loft is the other bedroom which doubles as the master and is setup almost identical to the downstairs bedroom. Ted is downstairs making small talk with the couple’s house that we are in and I yell down to him that I think I’ve seen the entire house and there is only two bedrooms. He says something to them in Chinese and yells back to me that they would put a bed in the loft if we decided to rent the house. This apartment definitely had the feel of a one-child policy apartment.

We left the apartment and made our way to the next two apartments where we were able to meet a lot of nice Chinese couples and their children. While walking around the city on this cold and snowy night it was great to see the determination of the Chinese people on their mopeds. Picture a snow covered street that has been driving on by cars and truck and now the snow while packed down its not level or even close to level this creates an interesting situation for a two wheel moped where we got to see more than one moped driver going no more than 5 MPH fall over while driving down the street and get back up just to do it all over again.

We finally decided on the first apartment that we saw with an agent named Daphene , the apartment is in the Sanlitun area of Beijing which is the area that is most famous for the Bars, Restaurants, Shopping and Embassies. It’s a great location for us except how far it is from school. We have a 20 minute walk to the subway then a 10 minute ride on the subway followed by a 15 minute walk to school. Unfortunately close to school there isn’t much as far as a life goes so living where we live is great. We are about 8 KM to the east of the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square and the best thing about our place is we have a western grocery store downstairs. If you look at the pictures I posted the other day April Gourmet is the grocery store where you can buy a half gallon of Florida’s Natural OJ for the equivalent of $13. I’ve been drinking an OJ “Drink” that I can get for about $3.