Living in an all tile apartment is kind of like living in a really bigbathroom.

After my wonderful traveling adventure from the US of A to my city of Zhengzhou, China, I was shown to the apartment I will presumably spend the next year in (not concurrently of course; my apartment certainly isn't like a prison; I don't have a gym, mattress or reliable Internet connection). I live on campus (one of the campuses; supposedly we have a north, south and west campus at different parts of the city). When first entering my apartment, it looked just like any other building; square and old. We walked in and while entering the cement building, Tom (my friend who picked me up from the train station) started walking kind of funny. He would stomp really hard for a few steps. Apparently, to turn on the lights they needs a loud noise. It was at this point that I knew they spoiled the teachers and I was moving into a pretty ritzy place. I mean, I can totally remember the clapper. Nothing says "high class" like "clap on, clap off (or am I thinking The Karate Kid?)." (OK... let's see. Question mark, parenthesis, period, quote and another parenthesis. Yeah. I don't know if I should be an English teacher after all. And what is a single parenthesy?)





Um. Sorry for the side trackedness of my mind. English is weird. Maybe I am just thinking that because I have been speaking so much Chinese lately.

Where was I? Oh yeah. My high class apartment. So we have the awesome clapper (or foot stomping) lights to help to us see so we can unlock the padlock that keeps my apartment secure (incidentally, having a padlock for your apartment also makes it easy for people to use their own padlock to lock you in your apartment).  Turns out all of the doors here don't have doorknobs. They have slider bars.

After we opened the door, I was able to behold my new home in all its glory!

Here is my apartment!

My apartment is great! It has a living room, bedroom, study and even has a walk-in closet; all conveniently as the same room! The picture you see is actually not too bad. Since I don't start teaching classes for a couple more weeks, I have been able to spend a lot of time cleaning. Basically, everything was broken, or close to it when I got to my apartment.

So after having spent nine hours on a train and another half hour on a taxi, I was pretty excited to finally be able to use the bathroom. Lucky for me, someone left a nice welcoming present for me in the bathroom (or rather, in the toilet). I guess that is to be expected when your toilet does not have a handle or button for you to flush it with. Not to be deterred, I (the next morning) discovered the string attached to the little lifter up thing in the toilet reservoir. All you have to do is reach your hand in the nice, clean, unrusty water to grab the string and "wahlah!" Problem solved. Welcoming gift gone. Well. Mostly gone. "Wahlah!" Second flush and it is completely gone!

The black stuff is not mildew; it is vintage decoration

The bathroom has been a work in progress. After spending a day cleaning the kitchen, I decided to spend a day working on the bathroom. In the left corner, there was a pile of black... stuff. I scrubbed the floor tiles pretty well until you could see the lovely color of pink they now are. I put the lid back on the toilet reservoir and made the best fix I could with the material I had so that I could flush the toilet without getting my hand wet.

Shower curtains are lame

One thing that is interesting in China (or my apartment anyway... I haven't really been to too many homes yet) is that all of the pipes are exposed. Kind of fun. The picture here shows the water heater for the shower. It is pretty cool actually; it has settings for how hot you want it, and you can even set a timer on it so that it is only on during certain times of the day. Something else that is different with the shower is that it is basically right on top of the toilet. There is no shower curtain or anything like that. This actually is pretty convenient. Every night I choose a section of wall I want to clean and I just scrub as I am taking a shower. It is pretty easy to just hose everything down in the bathroom.

Since the walls are all tile, you can hang anything you want wherever you want using suction cups. Here you see a suction cup towel rack. This is a hand towel; yes, this is what I use for a regular towel. Apparently towels are more expensive and harder to find here than I thought they would be.

Toilet Flusher. AKA, kid with his head stuck in the toilet. So when I got to the apartment, I had very little. I was able to use my dental floss for string and this cup they had in the apartment. When I want to flush, I just temporarily rescue the boy's head and lift.

My hallway

Here is my hallway. It is pretty stellar. It lets my get from my bathroom to my kitchen in warp speed. It also makes for a great place to store the broken computer I was given. Also; this is where I do my laundry. Washing clothes here is pretty fun. You put them in the little washing machine and it spins everything around with water. When you get your laundry, it comes out all twisted up together. Handy for the times that you want to grab all of your clothes at once in a large bundle. There is a piece of string in the kitchen that can be used for drying clothes. It works well.

On top of the washing machine is the extension cord I had to buy. Oddly enough, they built a place for a washing machine, but there is no outlet. When I want to do laundry, I hook up the extension cord to one of the outlets in the kitchen. In the picture, you will also notice a few other things I bought when I got here: A digital scale (my weight is pretty much the same as when I left), a broom and dustpan (why are they not like this in America? I love having a dustpan connected to a stick. Plus, it is green and looks awesome).

Now on to the kitchen!

My kitchen

When I first entered the kitchen, there was a wood desk, rusted pots and a black floor. I spent a good many hours scrubbing that floor before I would actually walk on it. I went ahead and bought the blender, shelf and power cord so that my kitchen would be somewhat usable.  I was pretty sad when I realized that I would not realistically be able to cook food. Without having an actual counter makes that difficult. Perhaps in the future if I buy a sturdy shelf, I could get rid of the microwave and use that space (it should be noted that the only thing I have used the microwave for so far was for microwave popcorn. It was orange flavor and it was delicious).

Yay for water

My fridge is quite nice. After having cleaned it and gotten rid of its nasty smell it works wonderfully to store fruit and water (haven't really bought other real food yet). Yesterday I finally figured out how to buy the water canister. Up until this point, I have been boiling my water before I drink it. After noticing rust spots on the bottom of the sink from dripping water and noticing pain in my throat, I decided it would be better if I found out how to get real water.

Needless to say, moving into a new place is always an adventure, and never really my idea of fun. I have learned to make things work with what I have. I have made a few repairs that might even make MacGyver smile; so here is my list of MacGyverisms:

• Used an old wire hanger as reinforcement for the broken bar that goes in my closet to hang my clothes. I used packing tape to tape the bar in place (sadly; I spent about three hours walking around one day and was not able to find any duct tape).


• Excessive suction cup usage for shelves.


• Used dental floss and a cup to make a toilet flusher.


• Reupholstered  my sofa chair with an old ugly sheet that sadly is many times better than the sofa without it.


• Used my broken tea kettle to replace the missing leg on my sofa. Turned out to be the perfect size!

Well; I am looking at my TV stand right now and realizing I don't really use a TV anyway... I think it would make a perfect microwave stand!