Uuuhhh

Citibank has been told that I am in China. I've told them on at least two occasions, once when I called from New York and once when I called from here a couple of weeks ago to have a block taken off of my account. I don't use the card often but I recently used it to buy a baby shower gift from Toys R Us and have it sent to a friend in Connecticut, and also to buy something at the grocery store here when I'd forgotten to put more cash in my wallet. I just logged on to the Citibank website to pay my bill and saw a message that I need to call in to Citibank due to some 'high-risk activity.' I opened up Skype and called.

After listening to the usual recorded Citibank messages I heard a pleasant woman with an Indian accent say that the system is down for maintenance, could I please call back later. I have things to do today that preclude my sitting in front of the keyboard indefinitely so decided to see if I could avoid having to stay online by having someone call me back. I asked "Are you a human being or a recording?" From the other end of the line I heard someone say "uuuhhhhhh."

That's a human being.

Apartment Hunting - Chapter 4

I have a home.

Friday night S and I signed a lease on our fabulous two bedroom apartment in Sanlitun. Well, Stephanie was the one who signed, but my name is on the lease as an occupant. This was important because I want to make sure that there is not a problem with my registering with the police at that address, or coming and going on a regular basis.

The lease was written in both Mandarin and English, with a clause saying that if there was a discrepancy then the Mandarin version is the one that will prevail. In the lease there is a Force Majeure clause protecting the landlord from responsibilities if there are problems due to riots, war or Acts of God. That caught my eye and made me wonder.

Friday morning I went on an expedition to Carrefour, the French supermarket, to buy cleaning supplies and other things to prepare the apartment. I haven't been shopping for anything other than food for awhile but I quickly remembered how much I hate shopping here. The low cost of labor here means that there are numerous employees all over the store. Every time I picked up a broom or a mop to look at features there would be four or five or six people who came forward to show me a different version and yell at me to tell me that I should get the other one. It resulted in my having to sculk at the end of the aisle, trying to visually find an item I wanted and figure out which version of the item I would think best, then dashing up the aisle to pick it up, look at it, and dash back out of the aisle to my shopping cart before anyone started yelling at me. I know how to choose a mop, thank you very much, please stop yelling and shoving things in my face.

Customer service is very different here than in other countries. It was a bit better during the Olympics but they are over now and I want to avoid all stores again. I wasn't able to buy all of the things on my list (I don't have towels or sheets yet) because the selection wasn't very large and I felt like I'd run the gauntlet enough that day.

Yesterday the real estate agent had two ayis (cleaning women) in to clean the apartment, and I made several trips from where I've been staying with my suitcases, books, and other things, including the cleaning supplies I had bought at Carrefour. Today I won't be able to go to the new apartment, but tomorrow I'll take one or two more trips over and buy bedsheets and towels so that I'll be able to move in and start actually living there by the time the weekend arrives.

I have an actual apartment now. After eight months living out of suitcases it feels strange to know that I'll be able to unpack everything soon.

Traffic

Last night a cab ride that should have taken me 15 minutes instead took over 45. The special traffic rules for the Olympics are gone. I miss them.

My new apartment is located minutes away from places where I go regularly, and about 15 minutes from the subway. I've been living close to a subway line, but one that doesn't go places I usually go so I would need to transfer several times to get to my usual destination.

Taxis and subway are good. Traffic is annoying. I'm looking forward to buying a bicycle now that I have a place to put it.

Apartment Hunting - Chapter 3

I think I found a home!

I've looked at several more apartments with my wonderful Chinese broker who speaks almost no English. Yesterday afternoon he took me to view two apartments on the back of his electric bicycle. Neither of them were anywhere near as welcoming to me as the first place he had shown me, which was fabulous but overpriced. I loved it, but don't want to knowingly overpay.

Last night I was on my way to meet my friend S, a Beijing-born Chinese-American woman, when she called and asked if I'd mind looking at an apartment with her. We're both home hunting, both plan to live alone, and have gone to look at some apartments together then shared our opinions of the buildings, apartments, furnishing, and decor - or lack thereof. If she didn't like the apartment last night she was going to renew the lease on her current apartment. I was just along as a prelude to our dinner and to give another opinion.

We met close to where we had previously planned to meet, in the Sanlitun embassy area, a few minutes walk from an English-language bookstore, a good local grocery store, the yoga studio where I like to go, and lots of good restaurants. We met the broker on a street corner opposite from Beijing's Worker Stadium, a central landmark and the location of the Olympic soccor semi-finals and finals. Only a few minutes walk away we turned into the courtyard of a Chinese apartment complex where only three weeks ago S and I had both commented we would love to get in but the rents would probably be insane if any Chinese retirees were willing to sublet.

At the entry to the building we met the landlady, a Chinese woman in her thirties, then walked up four flights of stairs and waited while she opened a heavy metal door right off to the landing. The heavy metal door led to a private outdoor patio and another metal door, behind which was an indoor patio and a hallway into a place we never would have expected in a building that is over thirty years old. Spanish tiles in the entryway. High ceilings. Modern light fixtures. A bathtub. An oven (small, but still large enough for a brownie pan, cookie sheet or lasagna dish). Built-in bookcases. Generous storage space. Crown molding. Front and back patios. Southern and norther exposure. Views of green courtyard areas. Over 120 square meters of floor space. Two large bedrooms. The complex was built by the Soviet Union for senior communist party officials working in China in the late 1960s and it was made to last. Its location in the embassy area means that heat and power are reliable. All at a price well under market, maybe one third less, because the landlord wants someone they trust who won't be a problem.

The rent on the apartment is at the cap of what I was willing to pay, but for this apartment, the location and the space I would be quite happy to pay it. So would S. Such places are almost impossible for outsiders or foreigners to get into (no, we're supposed to want to live in overpriced, modern luxury monstrosities with all the character of an overcooked potato and filled with other foreigners), but S has local origins and guanxi (a network of relationships and connections) that are hard for a newcomer to access, and a friend connected her with this broker. As we looked through the apartment we kept commenting on the same things, or exclaiming for the other to look at some detail (crown molding!). We've decided that we'll share.

We're going back on Friday afternoon to take a look at the apartment during the day, check the water pressure and sign the lease. Last night over dinner in a nearby cafe we started to discuss decor and house rules; today we discussed them further and agreed to have a written agreement that clearly states financial responsibilities and some other information. Our next step will be to get a housekeeper in do a deep clean. If all goes well I'll be living there in under two weeks. I already know the area and have friends nearby, and will have easy access to most of the places where I go regularly.

Wish us luck!

Recovery

Last week was nine days straight of 18+ hour days. We did the classwork for two different semester-long MBA classes, Financial Accounting and Organizational Behavior. Anyone who slept more than six hours each night was considered an anomaly. Several classmates and I have tentatively decided that MBA programs are synonymous with sleep deprivation torture.

Our class is made up of over 40 professionals, men and women from China, the U.S., Canada, Germany, Isreal, Columbia, Chile, and other countries around the world. One brave woman is doing this while pregnant, due to give birth in a few months. Several program participants arrived in Beijing from North America or Europe only three or four days before class started. All in the group are driven to perform, though we have different strengths and weaknesses. In our first week we had brilliant professors, both of whom have earned success in the business world in addition to their recognition in the academic world. One of them is dean of the undergraduate business program at Rutgers and the other teaches accounting at some of the top business schools around the United States.

We learned a lot in our first week. And we realize that over the next fourteen months we'll be learning a lot about time management and group dynamics, not just the subjects listed in the class syllabuses.

For now, we recover. Classmates who are not working spent Monday in a shell-shocked state. Yesterday I emerged from my bubble and met a classmate for kayaking on Houhai, the lake where we usually go for dragonboating. I needed that after nine days sitting at a table and almost no physical activity.

Now we have two and a half weeks before our next one-week intensive and we have to prepare.

Apartment Hunting - Chapter 2

My apartment hunt has been temporarily put on hold, pending the end of my first intensive week of classes next week. This morning, however, I received a call from the friendly, non-English speaking broker at Wo Ai Wo Jia. He had two apartments to show me. I scheduled an appointment to meet him this afternoon.

After my frustrations while looking at apartments last week I put together a list of things that are important to me to have in an apartment. I wrote it down, then a fabulous translator friend typed it in Chinese. We printed it out and now I can show it to Chinese brokers so that they know what I want:

"I am looking for a 2 bedroom furnished apartment, preferably in a Chinese complex (not an international compound), in Dongzhimen, Dongsishitiao or Yonghegong, with a one-year lease.

The apartment should have:
24 hr hot water
heat included in the rent
a western toilet
an enclosed shower (shower cabinet) or a bathtub
natural light during the daytime
tile, parquet or wood floors (no wall to wall carpets)
elevator if above the third floor (24 hrs)
air conditioner
high speed internet access
An oven (for baking) would be nice but is not a requirement.

I am ready to move in immediately upon identifying an apartment and signing the lease but do not need to move until I find the right place.

I have Chinese and foreigner friends who speak and read both Chinese and English and can help me understand the contract before I sign it."

You may have laughed when you read the list. Some older homes here don't even have running water, so I want to make sure that a realtor knows that it's important to me, and that I want it 24 hours a day. The hot water in some places turns off after a certain hour, so again I decided to specify. Many apartments have bathrooms with 'open' showers, which means the shower head is just a spigot or a handheld showerhead mounted on a wall, with no tub or compartment to separate the 'shower' from the rest of the bathroom. It can be a nightmare to clean, and one that I saw had the showerhead pointed right at the toilet, with not enough room to stand up or turn around. No thank you. Some buildings with elevators turn them off after a certain hour. I don't want to ever have to make a decision to leave somewhere early, or to stay out until five or six in the morning, because of an elevator being turned off.

High speed internet access is necessary because, well, because I want internet access at home and it can take months to have installed if an apartment does not already have it.

This afternoon the broker took me to two apartments. One had two bedrooms, two living rooms, a long enclosed porch and lots of great light. Unfortunately, the shower looked, um, 'nasty,' there were plastic grape vines and bunchs of grapes attached to the ceiling of one of the living rooms - a dusting nightmare, and the apartment required climbing seven flights of stairs. The second place had an elevator, two bedrooms and a view over a small hidden park with a lake from the master bedroom. The pitfalls were that the second bedroom and the living room both faced an unpleasant looking airshaft, there was very little light, the furniture was old and dark, and the layout made the place feel smaller than it was.

I explained to broker, in bad Chinese and with lots of hand gestures and laughter, that I like to have friends over but few would walk up seven flights, and that the other place felt very dark. Now he has my email address so he's going to take photos of places and send them to me. I also pulled out a calendar and explained that I'll be 'studying' all next week, from morning until night. We're going to resume apartment viewing after that.

It's an adventure, but I know I'll find a place I love if I'm patient and keep looking. If not, there's always the luxury foreigner ghettos.

Scrabble Update

I asked a friend who spent her childhood here about how Scrabble is played in Chinese. It's not.

Local schoolchildren don't have time for games. They're working too hard. The most commonly used learning method is memorization, and students have to memorize a lot. There is little time for any type of extracurricular activities.