random pix: spotted in Jiu Long Cheng (my building)

Remember what I said before about trust issues? Well this is the entire contents of someone's apartment, sitting in the first floor elevator waiting area. It stayed here like this for almost three full days and I didn't notice anything missing any time I walked by.

Speaking of trust and safety, this apartment was completely open with no one in it for a decent amount of time (I wandered in and poked around). Apparently no one thought this was hazardous for say, children in the building.

 

Nothing strange about an elevator full of old logs. Nothing at all.

random pix: lavatopy directions, a huge butt & a Mexican Burrito

 

I wonder, where does the inventory go when it's closing time...

Why wouldn't you want a giant ass on the hood of your car?

This, my friends, is a Mexican Burrito. It is scrambled eggs, beef, Tabasco sauce and cilantro on top of Doritos.

trust issues

Chinese people have very interesting ideas about trust. I am forever having Chinese friends or even strangers on the bus, tell me to be mindful of thieves trying to steal my purse. It has a long strap, so I wear it diagonally across my body, and it usually falls behind me. It has a snap closure, so I very seriously doubt that short of cutting it off of me, there's any way anyone could relieve me of it, or any of its contents, without my knowing. They always want me to wear it in the front though, so I can see it and be sure.

Chinese are also people that put bars on their apartment windows... regardless of whether they live on the first floor, the sixth floor or the twentieth floor. Naturally, The Crack Den 2.0, my old first floor apartment in Songyuan, was an unfortunate, rare exception to that rule. People were always telling me there that I shouldn't open my windows even if I was home because I might not hear an invader. Here in Xiamen, my eleventh and a half floor bedroom windows have bars on them (though they're not very secure so I'm not even sure what the point is). My eleventh floor living room balcony does not have bars.

So you have things like that, where people are maybe a touch paranoid, but then you have things that go 180 degrees in the opposite direction...

As I've mentioned before, China basically doesn't have clothes dryers (I have met one person that owned one in past 14 months). The washer will either have a killer spin cycle or it won't spin at all and you'll have to manually move the clothes to the "dryer", which will just spin them a bit.

So everyone hangs their laundry out to dry. Everywhere. Apartment building rooftops, public parks, in front of restaurants, I mean everywhere; there is always laundry hanging in random places you KNOW nobody lives. And apparently no one is worried about their clothes being stolen. Now, I don't worry about my purse being on my back or someone coming in my eleventh story window (heck, if they can manage that, I will just GIVE them something for the effort, I'll be so impressed), but my laundry is something I wouldn't leave to dry outside of my own apartment.

More importantly than clothes, let me tell you about money. Actual money. A lot of businesses that I frequent don't have a cash register. Maybe they have a cash drawer, a completely unorganized drawer full of loose change and bills with absolutely no system of accounting for it at all. Or if they're fancy, maybe they do have a cash register, but usually the cash isn't divided like you might think, with a slot for the 1s, a slot for the 5s, a slot for the 10s and so on and so forth, the cash register is just a facade for the cash junk drawer. And it's common for someone to give me change out of their own pocket instead of the drawer. You trust your employees this much?! Granted a lot of businesses are small and family, but not everyone there is family...

And then there's the weird situation I am in with my rent and utilities. I pay rent quarterly here, same goes for utilities (water and electric). My landlord gets the bills for the utilities and then I pay when I pay rent.

After living in my apartment for one quarter, when I should have seen my first round of utility bills to pay, the property manager said she didn't have them because she had too many properties to manage, she just told me an arbitrary amount and expected me to pay. After quite a bit of back and forth, I paid the random amount and she agreed to email me all past and future utility bills. Never got a thing. 

After the second quarter I was here, I asked for the bills so I could pay, but she wouldn't even let me pay rent, she was on holiday and couldn't be bothered to pick up any money I transferred to her. I ended up paying rent three weeks late and still no utility bills. She told a Chinese friend of mine if she didn't produce them I didn't have to pay.

This sounds great and all, except that this woman has 3,500 RMB in deposits from me that I want to get back when I move out- 3,000 RMB for the apartment and 500RMB for utilities. I'm thinking if she keeps not asking me to pay, she's going to screw me in the end, never show me any bills and keep my deposit. My Chinese friend says that the landlord and I are friends so she probably just won't make me pay at all. What?

So, we don't trust people with purses and breaking into our apartments, but we trust everyone in the public with our laundry, all employees and utilities don't need to be paid... or something like that.

Tomb Sweeping Day

Not too far off the heels of Spring Festival is Tomb Sweeping Day/Clear Brightness Day (this one was actually Thursday). I ever-so-politely invited my SO and I to a Chinese friend's family home in Shi Shi, a suburb of Quanzhou, for the holiday.
Shi Shi is about an hour and a half away from Xiamen by bus and about thirty minutes outside of Quanzhou. It's apparently known for a booming clothing manufacturing industry. Coincidentally, Quanzhou is also where the school I initially signed on with when first coming to China is located.

I knew my friend's family had a lot of money because A.) she has not one but two siblings and B.) she's going to grad school in England and her father is paying for the whole shebang. When we arrived at her apartment though, I discovered that were we staying at the nicest home I have ever been to in China.

Napoleon? Of course.

I absolutely love this wall. The door to the storage room (or what in a western home would be used as the pantry) is all but hidden when it's closed!

Oh yes, that is a projector you see over the couch and central air vents over the loveseat. I've never even heard of central air here before.

I think she felt a lot of pressure to entertain us in Shi Shi. The 24ish hours we were there, we rode in three of her family's cars (three!), went to two coffee shops, three restaurants, one temple, one museum and one beach. When I asked her what she'd be doing if we weren't there, she said sleeping, ha.

The temple in Shi Shi was nothing too special. More colorful than your typical, northern China temples- much closer in style to Taiwan's temples, but I realized I hadn't been to a temple in southern China at all yet. The best part was definitely the view of the harbor.

Because Buddha like juice boxes too you know.

After the temple we went in to Quanzhou to go to the museum (and as my third Chinese museum, I have decided they're all pretty awful).

This is somehow underwear. My Chinese friend was also confused...

They are way too trusting with these tiny "No Touching" signs and no other barriers or precautions to prevent said touching.

Seriously, too trusting.

I mean come on, this guy is begging to be touched.

Does this bother anyone else? It remind me of this (second photo from the bottom).

That night we ate out with her family for her brother's birthday. Her family isn't big on drinking (which we discovered when we were the only people that ordered beers with dinner). After dinner we returned home to eat chocolate cake and watch a movie. Everyone except her brother went to bed after the cake though; it was a very chill night. Not what I was expecting at all, especially since there had been rumblings of ktv for the birthday boy.

I was also surprised to find that their entire movie collection seemed to be subtitled American action movies. Her was just apparently the only one interested enough to stay up and watch Minority Report (after he'd turned off Looper because it was too long).

Awesome projector screen movie viewing experience.

The beach the next day had a sand sculpture contest. There were a bunch of Disney sculptures and some Chinese themed designs as well that I enjoyed.

You know you love this. I certainly do.

After the beach it was time for us to catch our bus home to Xiamen and leave the family to do the actual holiday thing. Tomb Sweeping Day is about honoring ancestors by visiting their graves and burning "money" for them to use on the other side (this used to be real, but now they mostly print fake money for it). Not exactly something we needed to crash.

Chinese New Year

Life has finally just about returned to normal in China after Chinese New Year/Spring Festival. Spring Festival is the biggest, most important holiday all year and interrupts almost all aspects of life here for about three weeks. I missed the whole thing last year, but I did catch Lantern Festival, which fell soon after.

This year, Spring Festival was quite soon after my family had come to visit me for a two week excursion around China and my SO had moved to Xiamen from The States. My SO and I decided to conserve funds and stick around town whilest everyone else was traveling for the holiday. It was really quiet around town, especially the area we live in, which was actually quite nice and relaxing, though it was pretty challenging to find food or entertainment outside of our home.

We really only did one authentic Chinese thing over the holiday. For the actual day itself, Chinese New Year, we joined a coworker at her family's home an hour outside of the city.

We sat around drinking baijo with the grandparents and parents (my SO's first and probably last experience with baijo, I think). We had a big family hot pot lunch where we were seriously force overfed. We went for a walk in "the country", which turned out to be a themed park with paddle boats, farming exhibits, a ropes course and other random treats. I stumbled upon and joined a grandpa, son and baby trio shooting off fireworks in (at?) "the country". And then we went home because we were exhausted.

Spring Festival didn't seem like as big of a deal here in part because everyone goes home to their families and few people are actually from Xiamen, and also in part because fireworks are illegal on the island. Lantern Festival actually happened without us even knowing until the night of because of this (which was SO disappointing). Ah well.

skewed vision

Chinese people have a bit of the same stereotype-y ideas about looks that we do. The same way that someone in The States might say all Chinese look the same, a lot of Chinese would say that all non-Chinese look the same. 

In Songyuan, many Chinese thought my black, Jamaican friend and I were sisters. Tonight on the street, someone told me I look like Beyonce. I'm about as white as they come.

So, clearly, there are some interesting things with perception going on here.

But I've come across something else pretty funny recently. I dyed my hair hot pink a few weeks back, and naturally have gotten quite a bit of attention for it. What's been surprising to me though, is the number of Chinese people that think it's my natural hair color.

After assuming it's my real color, they will almost always tell me there is something wrong with me. I don't even know what to say to that. I can't imagine even a child anywhere else possibly thinking this color was natural.

Bikram (or something like it)... finally

Being that Xiamen is a decently large city, I was able to find a small yoga studio down the street from my apartment that actually had Bikram yoga (yay!)... or so they advertise.

Bikram is a pretty specific kind of yoga— it's an hour and a half long series of 26 poses, each repeated twice. It's done in a hot, humid room, so sometimes hot yoga places will try to call themselves Bikram studios, but if it's not this specific series, it's not Bikram. So being able to find an actual Bikram class here was theoretically great, because even though I wouldn't understand the instructor, the series is the same so I'd still be able to do the class.

The studio is pretty cute, it has one studio with the requisite mirrored walls, save for an ocean scape on the fourth wall, and can only handle maybe ten practitioners per class, which I really like. This studio is a little different than the last time I took a yoga class at the gym; it isn't nearly as quiet and relaxing. Even though we do meditate sometimes, people talk and grunt and fart and laugh as they please. The room is actually really loud until class starts, and people come in late and leave early and answer their phones without a moment's pause.

After I found the place, I bought a yoga mat and a package of classes, got the class schedule and started showing up to the Bikram classes— and then I was just kind of confused. In the classes, it was usually obvious that the instructors had seen a Bikram video once or twice, or had some basic knowledge of it, but there were only maybe one or two Bikram poses in each session.

The classes were pretty funny though at first. There are two instructors that speak no English and seemed pretty worried to have me there (the third Bikram instructor was an environmental engineer or something cool like that in Seattle for like seven years, random). Basically, nobody else speaks English either, neither the front desk staff nor the other practitioners, so it's pretty much all a game of charades.

Once they figured out that I had some yoga background and was halfway decent at guessing what they meant when they called out positions and corrections, they relaxed a bit. If I'm not understanding something they'll usually stop walking around and demonstrate or just come over and fix me. They are not shy about touching practitioners... or climbing up on us and pulling on us with all their might.

There's one instructor that really beats on us, and she can't for the life of her understand that I'm not flexible in the same ways as Chinese people. She pushes me like nobody's business on positions that require hip or lower back flexibility and kill me, and then is really surprised when I can do backward bending positions or things that require shoulder flexibility better than her.

After I'd been going to classes for a few weeks, the front desk handed me a written note one day asking me to call two hours before I'm coming to a class, which made me laugh and lead to my biggest Chinese victory so far. I had a friend teach me how to make the call ("Hi, I'm the foreigner. I'm coming to yoga class at 6:15pm. Thanks."), and the first time I did it they understood me on my first try, no repeating; win!

Now, it turns out there's usually one or two people in class that speak a little English, so they will occasionally collectively ask me questions or say things to me. The first thing they usuaully comment on is my being an American and being skinny, which I never have a clue what to respond with.

I also found out that the classes I go to used to be straight Bikram, but the Chinese complained, they think it's too boring and repetitive. I guess I understand that, and even though it bums me out, I'm still happy to be able to get some kind of work out there.

Taiwanese garbage truck = ice cream truck?

Club 1801

Being a big city, Xiamen has a decent variety of both bars and clubs (I think of a club as being a place with a dj and, theoretically, dancing and the like). The bars primarily function like western bars, but the clubs are definitely a little different.

Most of them don't have a large dance floor, rather almost all of the space is occupied by tables, both low ones to sit at and tall ones to stand around. The small dance floor they usually have is actually a runway or stage, for they all have some kind of live entertainment that happens at regular intervals every evening. They have fashion shows, singers (western and Chinese) and dancers, and sometimes they have themes.

 
Guests hang out at the tables and play Rock Paper Scissors (yes, seriously) and Chinese dice for drinks, with small breaks for dancing and watching the shows.

Westerners also prove to be a good attraction for the clubs, so they all have some kind of system of giving foreigners free drinks. And this is how I came to work in a Chinese nightclub.

One of the floor shows at my club, a singer and models.

The clubs all have some pretty decent screens to play whatever on all night.

When I first got to Xiamen, I found I had a lot of free time- MUCH more than in Songyuan. I was out at a club one night and the manager of the International Department (aka the people in charge of bringing foreigners in and keeping them happy with free drinks) asked me if I wanted to work for him. I declined for a while- as a general rule I'm not a fan of clubs; I don't like to dance and, as a non-smoker, I don't like cigarette smoke. Eventually I came around though, the pay wasn't great per hour, but it was an additional half month's teaching salary for just hanging out and drinking with people every other night (oh yes, I got to drink).

I worked every other night from 10:30pm to 3:30am and if foreigners came in, if they knew anyone in the International Department, if they were good looking, if they looked like they weren't going to buy their own drinks, my job was to set them up with a table next to the stage, complete with all the free bottles of vodka or whiskey and mixers they could drink. Oh, and there were always snacks too.

If they were lucky, or more likely if they were friends of mine, I could usually pull off getting them free beer or a bottle of champagne (these being my personal preferences for beverages). The club was pretty particular about the drinks we could give away. Outside of bottles of vodka or whiskey, there was usually a limit to how many beers or bottles of champage we could give out in a night, and those were really our only other options for a table.

If lone foreigners came in, we had cards for single free drinks we could give out for them to redeem at the bar. When I first started, the cards were open, any single mixer drink or even a just Coke or something was game to trade for a card. About halfway through my time there, they switched and had three sets of cards made with a specific drink designated on each one, further limiting the options for free drinks.

The International Department consisted of my boss, myself and up to three other International Consultants (awesome job title, right?!). There were always supposed to be two Consultants working, and my boss was usually there. I really needed another consultant to be working, because outside of us, no one at the club spoke English, so I couldn't order drinks, or key them in to the computer myself. I did manage to communicate enough with the front desk hostesses to be able to tell them when I needed to tables and have them kick out the Chinese for me though.

The club routinely removed Chinese from tables to fill them with westerners drinking free drinks, which made me feel pretty bad at first, until I realized that a LOT of people at the club were paid to be there. They were supposed to act like they were having fun. When the small dance floor was empty, a bunch of them would get a text message telling them to go dance and make it look busy, or whatever the club wanted. Some of them were men, most were women. Some were models. Some were hookers of course. Most of them weren't allowed to drink. Eek.

There was one girl in particular that worked every night. She wore the same silver dress every night, wore the same disco ball Mardi Gras mask, stood at the same corner of the bar and had the same bored expression on her face. Every night. She ignored everyone that talked to her and confused the heck out of me.

Before I accepted the job at the club, I told my boss that I was new to Xiamen, didn't know many people and wouldn't be inviting the few I did out every other night like a club promoter. He said that was fine. Naturally, not long into the gig, he was asking me how many people we had coming every night. I'd mostly just make numbers up. If I hadn't seen a club kid in a while I'd text them, and when new foreigners came in, I'd give them my number and tell them they could text me next time so I'd have their table ready, but I'm neither obnoxious nor a salesperson.

The "having the table ready" line was actually kind of funny, because the foreigners' tables are all sort of interchangeable. Because the drinks are all free, a group never really has "possession" of a table to the point that they can tell other foreigners to leave, foreigners kind of just all mingle around all the foreign tables and drink whatever is on any of them. It can be kind of awkward at first, until you figure out what's going on, when a couple strangers walk up to your table, grab your booze and pour themselves a glass (this happened to me the first time I went as a patron).

Working at the club would have been a great job... if I was like 22. I found that most of the same people came in every night, and most of them were nice enough, fun to party with, if a bit young. In this way, going to work was more like going to hang out with my club friends every other night. But on the random nights when no one came in, it was oh so very boring. Add that to the aforementioned reasons for turning the job down initially, and the fact that staying up till 3:30am every other night is pretty challenging, and you have me quitting after a month.

I also had some issues with my coworkers. I've got a pretty strong work ethic (tip of my hat to my Midwestern parents), so I was always at work at 10:30pm on the dot and I stayed at work, in the building, until I was off at 3:30am. It took me a few weeks to figure out, but when my Chinese coworkers (that I relied on to get our guests drinks) were "at work", they'd often put in an appearance and then leave. Even though the bartenders knew me, they still wouldn't help me when the other girls weren't there, because none of the departments really work together or stick their necks out for each other.

And then, even for the initial appearance, the other girls were usually at least 45 minutes late, stranding me with no way to do my job. One in particular was usually hours late, if she showed up at all. We didn't have a time clock or anyone to check in with, so no one knew and it was pretty frustrating. 

A few weeks in they bought a fingerprint time clock. My boss told me it wouldn't matter to me because I was on time, but the other girls would get docked 50RMB every time they were late. Now, a 50RMB deduction for being hours late is nothing really, but it's better than no consequences I suppose.

At first the time clock worried me a bit, because as a foreigner on a work visa with a Foreign Expert Certificate for teaching, the only job I can legally do in China is teach, and only for my school, so any record of me at all at the club was no bueno. I got paid cash under the table, naturally.

I certainly didn't look like I worked there, I just looked like a club kid that knew the system. I could wear whatever I wanted to work, there were patrons that came in more than me and I couldn't talk to anyone else that worked there.

All in all it was a good experience, I made some easy cash and met a couple of people I actually still talk to, but I'm definitely happy to only be going to the club about once a month, instead of every other night!

more on hair dye & vinegar & salon torture

Over the past summer, I did figure out the key to the whole not-washing-your-hair-and-using-apple-cider-vinegar-instead thing if anyone was curious. I started doing that back in June of last year and was definitely having some grease issues. Then in July, I met a girl traveling who was doing the same thing, except she had the missing piece- when your hair gets greasy you need to use baking soda to wash it.

This has its pros and cons. It killed the grease factor, which was awesome, but it also killed the softness and texture of my hair, which obviously sucks.

I haven't been able to find baking soda in Xiamen, even at the western grocery stores, and it took me six months to find a place to buy apple cider vinegar, so I've converted back into a regular hair washer. I just use apple cider vinegar to "set" my color the first wash after I get it done now. I still don't need to wash as often though (except my bangs) and use much less product than I used to, so I'm happy about that.

I've had some other interesting hair experiences since moving to Xiamen. I dyed my hair purple in November, as in Crayola purple, and it was absolutely fabulous. Unfortunately, two weeks after that, I gave the digital-torture-perm-machine a try and they completely washed out all my color. I always see Chinese girls with straight hair and gorgeous, perfectly curled spirals at the ends. I discovered that they all have digital perms that just begin about halfway, or lower, down their hair; I decided to give it a shot.

It's been quite a while since I had a regular perm (probably almost ten years), but if memory serves, I think digital didn't smell as bad for nearly as long. They put some chemicals on your hair, rinse after a while and then roll it with a little tissue paper in each curl, plug the curlers into the torture machine and then let you sit for about 30 to 45 minutes and voila. Seems simple, but somehow that simple process still took me about five hours.

My problem, aside from them washing out my beautiful purple color, is that I asked for the biggest sized rollers because I wanted big spiral curls at the ends. Also, that way, it would be easier to wear my hair straight. When the guy finished my perm though, he was kind of upset and tried to tell me that it didn't take very well so my hair wouldn't be very curly and he wanted to redo it. I didn't want it very curly, so I told him it was fine, I'd come back if I had a problem. He didn't speak English and my Chinese is still crap, so communicating wasn't exactly easy. He texted me later that night though and said he talked to some other people, he had an idea and he wanted me to come back in. I did the next day and he went right to work without even talking to me. He redid my perm with the smaller curlers and naturally I don't like it. That's my fault for not stopping him though.

The same guy did my color and my perm. He was at a salon down the street from my apartment that looks nice enough, but I didn't know anyone that had been there before or anything.

The next time I wanted color done, I told a Chinese friend of mine I'd go somewhere near her apartment if she'd take me and talk to them for me. She had planned to take me to a salon she'd been to once, but it closed, so she ended up taking me to one her boyfriend had gotten a haircut at, once. Not exactly the most promising beginning to a hair experience.

It was TINY, four chairs, all full, with four people waiting in other chairs and rotating in. It wasn't nearly as nice or clean, but it cost half as much as the one by my apartment and I was much happier with the result.

I asked for orange, bright orange, and ended up with an ombre orange to pink effect, due to whatever old dye was still in my hair, and it's pretty awesome (the lady offered to even it out but I said no).

That salon was also the first I've gotten my hair dyed at in China that didn't offer me different brands of dyes at different price points. That part I'm ambivalent about, but I'm definitely going back to the smaller, not as nice but significantly more awesome place next time.

random pix: wending photos

Being an island with beaches all around, Xiamen is perfect for awesome wedding photos. The way Chinese do them is a bit different though... They take professional photos of just the bride & groom waaaaay before the wedding, wearing clothes that aren't theirs (a few costume changes' worth) and in places they aren't actually getting married. It's phenomenal to watch. Often times with beers. Free entertainment!

Yes, "Wending" photos for everyone!

More than 20 couples on the same stretch of beach taking photos? No problem. At this beach, it happens every day.

Not going to lie, I want to do this.

Ignore the cute animal meeting, there is actually a couple in the background.

Same goes here. Why is he on a horse? Don't you want to be on a horse?

The junkyard wedding photos I do find a little strange. They're 100 yards from a beautiful beach... are they lost?

the hunt

Cost of living in Xiamen is much higher than either Songyuan or Tianjin, both due to the easy availability of more entertainment options and more western establishments, but also just because of the aforementioned size and economic factors of the city. This made my initial move here a bigger financial burden than expected. If I'd known about all the up front moving costs and been prepared I'd have been fine. I was not, soooo, it was not the most fun thing ever. I definitely had to get an advance on my salary to make it work, which is actually pretty common, but still, not a thing I think any westerner likes the idea of.

My school here didn't give me a fully furnished apartment as part of my contract, which had its pros and cons (and ended up proving to be the biggest struggle, naturally). My salary was theoretically higher to compensate, but now that I know all I know, it's just plain harder to save money here than Songyuan. Salaries are lower relative to cost of living. I'm really happy I got to choose my own apartment though. It has Chinese quirks, but quirks I'm comfortable with. It's a place I'm ok calling home (for a year), and I really like the area I live in. That said, it was definitely challenging to find and settle in to.

When I left Songyuan to travel in August, I was headed to Xiamen at the end with intentions of crashing on a friend's couch here until I found my own place. About a week before I was to arrive, my friend skype'd me to tell me he was moving back to the States and he'd be gone by the time I got here. No bueno. Luckily, his roommates were still fine with me staying on the couch, but of the three people in the apartment, I'd only met two of them before moving in with them, and only met them once at that.

Their apartment was great, and they were really nice people, but there were some obvious drawbacks. It was the hottest month of year and their apartment had ac everywhere EXCEPT in the living room, so sleeping was virtually impossible. They also all kept different schedules from each other and different schedules from me, so people were coming home drunk at 4am and ordering McDonald's delivery while others were getting up at 8am to go to make breakfast and go to work. It was exhausting.

View one direction from one of the balconies of my friends' 30th floor apartment. Not bad, not bad at all.

Finding an apartment on your own here is virtually impossible, not being able to read or speak. Most people have to use a real estate agent to find a place. Agent commission is half of one month's rent. Otherwise, there are a few local websites for English speakers where people post roommate wanted ads, sublets, "will" down apartments when they leave and things of that nature. As part of my contract, my school had to help me find an apartment, but after three weeks of searching and no dice on one that I was comfortable with, I went on a local forum and found a Chinese woman offering her apartment hunting services for less than an agent.

While she was looking, I decided three weeks on my new friends' couch was more than enough; it was time for another temporary move. I moved to an area further away from things (like my school) than I wanted to be (15 minutes commute instead of 5, boo hoo, woe is me), but I had a room with a bed and ac (yay!), and a bathroom and all that. I paid a pretty cheap rate to live there for half a month while I kept looking for my own place. The guys that lived there had actually both come to Xiamen from Songyuan, so we had a lot of friends and experiences in common, which was great.

I shared my room there with a friend from Songyuan that I had talked into moving to Xiamen around the same time I did. My school had been screwing with her visa, her pay, her schedule, etc. and she wasn't happy. We both discovered that moving into apartments in Xiamen was going to be more expensive than we had anticipated, so we decided to split the temporary room costs and share till we found our own apartments.

The woman I found on the forum ended up finding my current apartment after a little less than a week of looking, so we weren't there for very long anyway. She also negotiated the rent down a little bit for me, which was of course awesome.

In China, you pay rent quarterly, so to move in to an apartment you have to pay four months' rent right off the bat (three for the first quarter you live there and then one for the security deposit). On top of that, you probably have to pay your agent fee. You need to pay to change your locks when you move in since so many agents have the keys to one apartment. Then there is something akin to HOA fees that you also pay quarterly. You have to put a deposit on your utilities if you don't pay them directly each month, like me. Then there's internet, you pay for the entire year of service at once, you pay for setup and then if you have to buy wireless router that's an additional cost as well. There's drinking water, to get a water machine with the large jugs you have to pay for a large quantity of jugs up front and then they just deliver them to you as you use them up. And then, even for a furnished apartment, you need to buy normal house-y things, like plates and chopsticks and bedding and towels.

All said and done I paid more than two months' salary to get myself set up in this apartment. Eek.

I ended up in the below one bed, two bath, loft apartment on the eleventh floor of a large building that's also home to a somewhat bizarre variety of businesses. My boyfriend was moving to China to live with me at the end of December, so I got a bigger, more expensive apartment than I would have if I'd planned on being alone. The friend that shared the room with me while we were looking ended up staying with me here too until December so we could split costs and she could save money to tackle getting her own apartment.

I feel the need to stipulate that the below photos are pre me moving in a giving the place a serious deep cleaning.

my lofted bedroom

Yes, that IS a seriously random low bit hanging down from the ceiling in the middle of the bedroom that I constantly hit my head on.

living room

This is my master bathroom. "Complete" with three walls, one being frosted glass. I did mentioned apartment quirks, right?

It's hard to tell, but there is something serious missing here... any type of cooking surface under that large hood fan. And the appliance under the counter? It's a dish DRYER not a dish WASHER.

Major quirk #3: the urinal in the downstairs bathroom. And no, I don't use it.

I'm baaaaaack

It's been a long time since I've posted or kept up with what I've been doing, but I'm back. More importantly, I'm back with the intention of keeping up more consistently. So, where did I leave off? Ah yes, my move to Xiamen, in Fujian province, at the end of August, after almost a month of travels.

Xiamen is an entirely different ball game than Songyuan or Tianjin. A LOT of what I'd noticed and posted about in my previous home cities doesn't hold true here, and I attribute that to a couple main factors.

It seems to me that northern China and southern China are very, very different- the accents (northern Mandarin is more pure), the food (northern food is saltier, southern food is sweeter and spicier), the physicality of the people (northern people are shorter and stockier with potbellied men), the general attitude of the people (southern people seem friendlier toward strangers), etc.

Xiamen also has a lot bigger metropolitan area than Songyuan (not Tianjin, but my time there was limited) with a lot more western influence. There is a huge stone export industry here that draws many foreign business people (no quarries though, explain that one to me) as well as a large, well reputed university with several international programs and thousands of foreign students.

These things, as well as some factors more directly related to my school have made my life here significantly different. Stay tuned for details...

random pix: depressed fox, terrific cops & slomed salads

Why is this children's character about to hang himself?!

Songyuan traffic police are terrific!

If this doesn't help explain plumbing in Beijing, nothing will.