In order to give you guys a better idea of my life in China, I thought it would be a good idea to show you some pictures of where I am living.
These first two pictures show our living room area. It is not very big and not furnished very well, but we have enough to get by.
The bathroom is also very small, the shower is on the left side of the room, and the washer is in the bottom right hand corner.
This is a close-up of our shower. Much different from what I am used to, but I wouldn’t mind that at all if the water was a little warmer. Our gas bill is really high, even though we hardly use any warm water, and have now turned off the heat. Even when we have the water heater maxed out, the water is luke warm, so I can’t understand why our heater is using so much gas. Although the shower is cold, I like to look at everything in a positive way. This shower offers me the ability to shower while I am on the toilet, something that I have never had the option to do before. When I am rushed for time, a little multitasking in the bathroom helps to get me to class on time.
The kitchen is very small and very old, but so far everything is functioning properly.
The bedrooms are small, with barely enough room to fit a bed, dresser, and desk in them. The beds are hard, because beds here are just a box spring with a 1/2″ mattress pad on top of them. If you sleep in the wrong position, your body will hurt the entire next day.
The hallways here are disgusting. The floor is just cement that hasn’t ever been cleaned. So it is basically cement with about 1 cm of dirt over the top so they appear to be dirt floors. In the stairwell on each floor is a garbage can, shown here.
The hallways are by far the worst part of this building. They are extremely dirty, very cold when it is cold out, and smell terrible. There is dirt covering the floors, and the walls look like someone threw feces all over them, and I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if that is exactly what happened. Thankfully we live on the 3rd floor, because I have to hold my breath when walking from our apartment to get outside because the smell is so bad. That’s probably not the best idea either, because once I get outside I take a nice deep breath of the polluted air.
This place is definitely livable for the next four months. A few of the apartments where my friends live are much nicer, but they often pay much more and are in a worse location. Our apartment is in the perfect location, and was by far the nicest place that we were shown when we were looking at apartments. We are a block away from the bus stop that takes us right to school, and the gym is only a half block away. Everything else we could possibly need, from McDonald’s to Walmart, is within a block of our apartment.
Our apartment is nothing special, but it is sufficient, and I wish the hallways smelled a little better and were in much better shape. The coldest part of our trip here should be over, so the next problem we will be dealing with will be the extreme heat, and the effect of the combination of the heat and pollution on our breathing.
Beijing Shore 