Home Sweet Home

Welcome. Come on in. Let me give you a little tour...

It's daytime in our timeline - just after noon, I think. But because I often get things like this done late at night, these pictures would have you believe that it's night time.

First stop:

The place that I live in is officially named 烛光小区, or “The Candle Neighborhood.” This little plot of land is owned by the university. Its homes are given out to teachers, some retired teachers, and their families.

Mr. Kou pulled his car right up in front of my new home. It's kinda hard to see because it's dark. You couldn't see anything in the original picture, but I used some computer magic so that you can at least see it. Please excuse the fuzziness:



The second set of windows on the right is a part of my house. Just take a couple steps forward and turn right. And please ignore those spooky white spots on the picture. I'm blaming them on bad image quality and trying hard not to think about how the Ghost Hunters of America might tell me that those fuzzy white things are ghosts.

Erm..

So turn right.



Yep. That's the entranceway that I was talking about. That light that you see there? At night, it turns on when I walk in and stomp my feet. It's sound activated. Pretty neat, I think. Turn left.

Unlock and open the door.



When you go in, the first room that you see is my living room.



Yes. The first thing you see is my living room. But the first thing you notice - or, at least, the first thing I noticed - are the concrete floors.

"What happened?" I asked.
"The last teacher messed up the carpet, so we decided to throw it out."
"Oh... I see."

Yeah. So you see. Concrete floors.

Here's another shot of the living room from a different angle:



Yes. The map of China is crooked.
Yes. According to that map, Taiwan is part of China.
And yes. Those are Pringles potato chips on my coffee table. One tastes like black pepper steak. The other tastes like tomatoes.
And those couches? The covers are removable. I washed them before using them... It's very weird. Imagine my phone call to my parents that day:

"Uh... yeah. Give me a sec. I need to go take the couches out of the laundry machine."

Concrete floors aside, my apartment is HUGE for one person. In addition to the living room, I have two bedrooms, an office, a dining room, a kitchen, and a bathroom. Here's the main bedroom (aka my bedroom... aka the messiest room... aka please excuse the unmade bed):



I've attached some hooks onto the wall. And yes. Those are my monkey pajamas on my bed.

Opposite the bed, there's a little closet. I got it about two weeks in... after I had grown tired of living out of my suitcase. I bought the display closet from a nearby supermarket and built the closet with my bare hands.



It's... a closet. You can open it up and put things in it.. and stuff like that.

Yeah.

The curtain on the wall covers the windows to my balcony. I'm on the first floor... so I'm not sure if it's actually a balcony - but it's like a balcony. It's more of a sunroom. Since there aren't really any dryers available in China (not that I know of, at least), most people dry their clothes in the sun. See the clothes that I put for display?



In this particular room, I have a neat pulley system set up. You twist the handle, and one of the hanger things come down into reach. You twist again, and it rises up into the air so that I can reach the other hangers. Neat, eh?




The second bedroom smells kinda musty. There's a closet in it... but I bought a new closet just to avoid going into this moldy-smelling room. Here, you can actually see how hard the mattresses are. There's a picture of Chairman Mao on the inside of that door - I forgot to take a picture of it, unfortunately. I might get to it another time.

For the most part, though, I keep the door to this second bedroom closed. It scares me a little, you see. Because... look at that fuzzy white dot there. Yeah.



*shivers*

Let's get out of that room, yeah? Out of it. Shut the door. And enter my office.



That's my bike. It's blue like my car. I like my bike a lot. You can see the yellow helmet in the basket. There are two desks, a very old desktop, and a book case to the right. I do a lot of my prep work for class in here.

Head back out. Through the living room.
OH! Stop at the door.

I have two main doors. One opens inwards. The other opens outwards... and a little collection of locks and combinations ensures that no thieves can get inside. There's also a chance that I could lock myself outside AND INSIDE the house. You see the combination-looking thing? To open the door, I need to input a combination and use my key. No one knows the correct combination anymore. If I touch it, I will change the setting, and my key will not be able to get me in or out.

So? If I don't ever come home to the US of A, it's probably because I locked myself in my house in Baoding.

...Yeah.
Oh? Picture.
Here:




Across from the main door is my bathroom. The bathroom floor isn't concrete. It looks pretty good, actually. Looks like this:



See the wooden toilet seat there? It's not actually wooden - it's foamy.. ish.. but I wanted to point it out because I put that in myself. The old one had a bend down the middle of the side. I think someone in the past may have used it as a squatter. It also absorbed a lot of moisture so I went out, got a new one, and installed that wooden-looking one there.

Under the sink, you'll see this little tub. In the past, that was used as a place for the mop. You'd do your mopping, wash it in that tub, and let it dry out there. It's not used for that anymore.. mainly because someone built a sink over it.

Then... on the floor, a big drain.

Something seems to be missing, yeah?
Hm.
What's that?

A shower? Oh. Just look to the right.



That is my shower. There's a water heater on the top. I have to turn that on for half an hour before I want to shower, or I don't get any hot water. The other options is to leave it on all day and waste a lot of electricity....

But yes. That's the shower head. And when I turn it on, the shower shoots water right onto the bathroom floor.

Remember that drain?

It's supposed to drain. That's what it's called. That's it's function... but whenever I take a shower, about an inch or so of water covers up the bathroom floor. When I'm not showering - sometimes, water would come up out of that hole in the ground and leave a small puddle in the middle of my bathroom floor.

The good news?
A lot of my colleagues' bathrooms smell really... really bad. That smell usually comes from that drain. In my case, my bathroom normally smells OK.

It doesn't smell bad.
So yeah. I really like my bathroom.

Now, back up out of the bathroom. Back up, turn just a little bit... and BOOYAH!
My dining room and kitchen!






The floor in here is really clean.
I've swept and mopped it. Every time I mess it up, I clean it up. So that means... I can walk around without my shoes in this room. I like that.

...Why am I telling you this?
I just want to stress how.. nice.. it is to have a room where I can pace around in without.. my shoes on.

...Yeah.

See the toaster oven? That is my toaster. My stove is a hot plate. My washing machine is there too. I have to manually adjust the settings to make it go through all the cycles that it would normally go through by itself (in the States).

It drains into a pipe under the sink...
And.. speaking of that pipe (you can see it in the picture above) - a couple of days ago, one of my drains backed up and flooded my kitchen. Water just started guzzling up out of the ground, bring with it tons and tons of sewage... stuff.

I had to call someone from the school. He called a plumber, and everything got fixed up fairly quickly. But still.

...Yeah.

Well. That's my tour.
More to come on Day#1 in the next post.

And then... some more interesting day-to-day stuff.
I've also taken a couple of trips... but it's the day-to-day living stuff that interests me. You'll get to hear about everything later. For now, though-

Signing off.
Talk to y'all later.