Happy Birthday!

It's China's 60th anniversary today! And there's a big parade... which I only caught glimpses of on a TV screen. No foreigner is allowed around Tiananmen square today. But I already got a whole month of parade rehearsal on CCTV, so thanks, that's alright with me. I've actually stopped watching CCTV because I couldn't take it anymore. Interviews with soldiers about their great achievement of only being 5cm off when marching a kilometer in evenly spaced paces. Dedication, discipline and hard work - that's what 60 years China is about and that's what this parade is about... ehem.

When I left my hotel this morning, I couldn't help but notice how quiet it was, the streets were all empty and clean as I've never seen them before. Seriously, I think they started a major clean-up effort for the big day. And if I was thinking all those people were glued to the TV screen watching the parade, I soon learned better - they all went to the mall! Because October 1st is not only the National holiday, but also the National Day of Sales. I went to a big appliances mall (everything here seems to be concentrated in malls, which makes the shopping around easy, but it's also pretty intense, because every vendor is fighting for your attention. My boss and her family went with me (I think they're adopting me) and my boss haggled for me :) You can't really haggle in those malls, but you can always ask for a discount or a gift. When buying a water heater, I ended up with a 1,000yuan discount (almost 50%) and a free water kettle. For the fridge I had to cough up the whole promotion price of 1,300 yuan. And I will finally have a decent washing machine, after 6 years of North-American crap! I can't wait! I think I'll be doing laundry every day for the first month :) Picking out the stuff only took an hour, but paying and arranging delivery took up another hour. Fighting my way through the cell phone buying crowd was almost too much afterwards. Shopping is serious business here, not for the faint-hearted!

In case you're wondering why I'm buying stuff as if I'm moving into a completely empty apartment... well, that's because I am moving into a completely empty apartment. All it has is a stove, or rather two jet-engine style gas burners, a sink in the kitchen, a sink outside(!) the bathroom, toilet and shower. No hot water. No heating or A/C. But this is all not as bad as it sounds, because the connections are all there, even for the washing machine. It's just the way it works here - when you move out you take your hot water with you :) Thanks to the big discount I got a fancy water heater with remote control and timer... whoo. The place is the postdoc apartment I had been waiting for for a month. It turns out I could have moved in earlier. They were waiting for me to get my residency permit. But the foreign personnel apartment had told me, I should wait till I have a proper address before applying for the residency permit. So it was a hen-and-egg problem. I got the luxurious foreigner apartment, which was really built for the provincial government, but they never use it, so the university got part of the building as a postdoc residence. And the really awesome part (apart from it being on the 22nd floor with an amazing view) is that it's basically brandnew! The building is 7 years old, but nobody has ever lived in this apartment. The furniture (two bed frames, two desks, dining table, some wardrobes/shelves) are definitely used though and look like from the 70's. The hilarious part - I'm not allowed to throw any of the furniture out, because the management wants to "keep the standard" of the apartment. Well, I understand if you think IKEA furniture isn't the greatest in the world, but believe me, it tops the stuff that's in there! Oh well. I just have to paint the old furniture over or something... Nobody said I can't disassemble what I don't want and store it. The only real problem is the kitchen. It's tiny. And stove and sink are at a height of about 60cm. They must have thought whoever lives there gets a midget as a nanny. I'm contemplating to throw everything out and have a proper kitchen installed... just have to be careful I don't spoil the standard.

Last weekend I got an impression of the free housing market. My boss seemed to get worried about my housing situation and took me to check out a few places. We saw two agencies downtown (one of them was really creepy - sweaty men in a stinky office hidden in a back alley, cockroaches crawling on the floor and they wanted 500RMB before even showing us anything - we just ran) and - holy shit - that was an experience. First we saw a place for 1,300/month, which was really a hole. There was no proper floor, leaks in the bathroom and everything looked really run-down and dirty. The second place would have been 1,500/months and looked acceptable (the 70's style furniture prevailed also here), but the staircase wasn't exactly inviting - unless you're a rat maybe. I was told to keep the door shut at all times to keep the rats out. Charming. Finally we visited a place close to where my boss lives in a luxury condo building. Here are pictures of all three places (I have to say the scary factor doesn't really show in the photographs):

Apartment hunt

I would have felt a bit like cheating if I had moved there. Like "that's not the real China." But it is! Most of my neighbors would have been Chinese. Just the kind who can afford condos. And it seems there are not that few of them today. Anyways, I didn't want to live in just one room with someone else's furniture. So, when I got the news that I can have the postdoc apartment (which is almost free, the rent is 100RMB/month + electricity and gas; if I would have rented somewhere else, the university would have given me 800RMB subsidy) I was relieved. I'll probably spend all the money I save on rent on furnishing this place, but at least I can fix it up how I want. And this is what I started out with (this is already after cleaning the worst of the 7 years of dust):

My Apartment - naked

Next time I'll show you what it looks like one IKEA trip and 10,000RMB later... (I'm in serious debt with my boss, but I can pay most of it off when the university reimburses me for my flight. 1 plane ticket = 1 apartment furnishing, crazy!)