My new apartment is so-so. The good is: it’s not badly priced, it’s got a great view, and the landlords are great. I guess these are pretty important, especially the last one. Having lousy landlords could make it miserable.   Mine are indeed very nice and responsive and like to drink tea with me. I guess I’ve just had a lot of maintenance issues with it.

When I first moved in, I plugged in my desktop computer. About an hour later, there was a loud POP and the power went dead in the bedroom soon followed by the smell of smoke behind the walls. Uh, was that my computer’s fault? Thinking that it was, I set out more than once to look for transformers. I wasn’t well educated on electrical systems before, but having dealt with this, I at least have better working knowledge. I eventually was told by my neighbor Peter that it wasn’t my computer’s fault and that I didn’t need to buy a special power supply for my computer. OK, that’s good news.

A few days later, not one, not two, but three leaks suddenly sprung.   One of the toilets leaked.   The shower had quite a big leak, but at least it drained.   And there was a mystery leak inside the walls.   I discovered that by the pools of water in the hallway.   I followed the wetness to the walls and could see the waterstain seeping through the walls along a pipe.

Fixin’ the leak.

The landlord was great though and fixed those problems right away.   Other difficulties include silly stuff like not having sheet rock, which makes hanging up pictures hard.   Hmmm…now I have to go back and figure out the right tools for hanging up pictures on these mortar (I guess) walls.   There are numerous annoyances like this.   For example, the washer/dryer is totally mysterious.   Sometimes it takes forever, sometimes it’s really fast.   At least I’m now starting to figure out it’s peculiar personality traits.   Hanging up clothes can be tricky.   If the pollution moves in, you better pull them down fast or they’ll stink.   Gosh, so many other wierd little things like that that I know I’m forgetting to mention (seems like every day I have an “oh I have to write about that in the blog!” thought).

Oh yeah, then there’s the sink with a fetid odor emerging from it. Half the time I go into the bathroom it stinks and I need to turn on the fan and open the windows.   Sometimes it’s fine.   But, I found the culprit:   a simple lack of a large curve in the drainage from the sink.   The large curve (I at least knew this) “traps” water inside which prevents the stink from seeping out of the sink.   How hard would it have been to install this to begin with?   Anyway, they’re coming to fix that, thankfully.   Now, I just have to figure out why the rent didn’t hit my landlord’s account.   Time to bring along a colleague to the bank for translation, call up the Xiao Liu for the car, wait in line, figure out what’s up, etc. etc.   Time, time, time…

Aside from the maintenance, I like the location of my old place better. I miss being able to leave the building and have restaurants right there. I’m at least closer to work here.   Also, here, in Hua Qiao Cheng (or “Overseas Chinese Town”, the location where I’m currently living), I need to walk about 10 minutes to decent restaurants. And while they are still cheap by US standards, they’re still pushing twice the price of Futian.   And the quality isn’t as nearly as good…especially for the Hunan food!