A ROOM WITH A VIEW
March 2005
On our second day in Dalian, the people from the school
picked us up to take us to our apartment. Our apartment is on the third
floor of a six-story building, which is situated on a terraced hill. There
are 61 steps from the street up to our building, and another 35 to get to
our flat. The stairwell gives one the impression that the building has been
abandoned for several years, but luckily our apartment is in much better
condition. However, our flat has a few quirks. Upon entering the front
door (whic
h can only be done with a key since there is simply no door handle
on the outside), the shower is immediately to the right. The toilet is
literally in the shower. Let me emphasize this: We don’t actually have a
bathroom at all. We have a shower with a toilet in it. They have the same
drain. Furthermore, we found out the hard way that we’re not supposed to
flush toilet
paper down the toilet (picture me fishing out the never-flushing toilet
paper with a spatula). We’ve since bought a little trashcan with a lid
whose brand is “Howfun.” So now, every time we go to the shower room to use
the toilet, we think how fun it is to have to put our toilet paper in a
trashcan.
Past the shower, on the right, there is a little
hallway leading to an enclosed, really small balcony or porch (3 feet by 12
feet). There is a sliding glass door separating the porch from the rest of
th
e flat. The bottom half of the porch has tile and the upper half has
large sliding glass windows. There is a rack attached outside below the
window for drying our clothes. The porch has no heat, and since it sticks
out of the main apartment building, it is really cold. On many mornings the
window panes were covered in ice, which then melted throughout the day,
leaving a puddle on the floor. This porch is also supposed to be our
kitchen, but having deemed it unworthy of such a title, we just call it the
porch. At one end of the porch is our only sink, and at the other end, a
lone gas burner. Ovens are unheard of, so there’ll be no homemade cookies,
brownies, cakes, pizzas, or casseroles for us over the next year.
Since the porch made an inadequate kitchen, we have
transformed the hallway leading to the porch into a kitchen. We bought
wooden shelves and put boards on top to make a counter (because there wasn’t
one anywhere except under the gas burner on the porch). This hallway also
houses a washing machine, a bottled-water dispenser, a microwave and a
fridge. We created a second “sink” by using the washing machine spigot and
placing a plastic bowl on a table underneath it. When the bowl fills up, we
dump it down the shower/toilet drain. This whole area is quite small; our
bed is bigger.
We have two large rooms: the living room and the
bedroom. In the living room, we have a couch that is hard and could only be
described as hideous. There is a large bookshelf, a table, and two pink
stools. We also have a pump organ that sounds a lot like an accordion,
although we don’t play it very often. In our bedroom, we have a bed and a
wardrobe. Our apartment also came equipped with two TVs. One is broken and
one works in theory but does not receive any channels. We have the
less-broken one set up in our bedroom and it looks really nice. (I wrote
this a while ago, and it has since been fixed.)
So, our flat can’t quite compare with our 2-shower,
2-bathroom (notice the separation between those two entities!), 6-sink,
4-bedroom house in Namibia, but we’ve managed to make it livable by
rearranging and cleaning everything. The bedroom and living room were clean
enough when we arrived, except the windows were disgusting, but the porch,
hallway, and shower were incredibly dirty. I can imagine that you’re
wondering who lived here before us. Well, it was none other than a previous
teacher at the school, a guy named Craig from Ohio. Go figure.
But don’t despair about our reduced living conditions,
for we have a view. In our bedroom is a large south-facing window, from
which we can see the ocean (far away), Xinghai Square (the largest square in
Asia, as the locals proudly informed us), a ferris wheel and space shuttle
in the Oriana Luxurious Cruise Theme Park, the Dalian Modern Museum, both
the new and old convention centers, a stadium, several handsome skyscrapers,
a few hills, and many other apartment buildings.
Furthermore, our location is great. At the bottom of
our street is the 202 trolley, which we take to school. There is also a
major bus stop with about every bus in Dalian. We could walk to the sea in
about 30 minutes (although we haven’t done it yet because it’s been so cold)
and on summer evenings, apparently half of Dalian goes to hang out at
Xinghai Square. There are many nice restaurants down on the main road, and
we are only one trolley stop (or a ten minute walk) from a giant 7-story
mall.
But perhaps the best part is our street itself.
So far, on our street, we’ve bought pineapples, strawberries, apples,
bananas, roasted sweet potatoes, fried cornbread pancakes, onions, and potatoes. And
that’s just the food we can recognize at the vendor’s stalls. If we wanted
to, we could also buy seafood, seaweed, numerous other fruits and
vegetables, Chinese newspapers, shoes, cigarettes, shish-kabobs, dumplings,
various forms of fried or steamed breads, lots of cheap plastic stuff,
toilet paper, wallets, sunglasses, etc. There is also a convenience store
where we can buy Snickers bars, soap, ramen noodles, chicken feet, juice,
and yes, ICE CREAM! That’s right folks, I live a mere two minutes from ice
cream. So I’d say we’re happy here in China.
click here for more photos of our
apartment and
neighborhood
