Movin in to my apartment.

So, there I was, having just received my apartment key from my real-estate agent, all smiles and expectation, ready to get in there and finally start making myself at home. So I walk up the stairs (I’m on the fourth floor, by the way), open the door, and walk in. But then, much to my surprise, I start to notice something strange about the place as I am setting my things down. It seems as though this apartment is still being lived in---there are snacks in little Tupperware one the counters, dirty dishes in the sink, covers and pillows on both beds, a dog cage with food and water in bowls nearby, and any number of other little things that hinted towards habitation, and by extension, an intrusion on my part. I felt weird, but at the same time, I didn’t want to impose on my friend any more when I now had a place to stay, so I went to the spare bedroom, pushed aside a bunch of stuff, and put my suitcase down. Notice I said “spare bedroom”. I did not go to the main bedroom, because the main bedroom was in fact closed from the inside and locked shut. I did not have the key. Also, I was pretty sure I could hear someone moving around in there whenever I knocked on the door. Hmmmm…ok, so it looks like I have a squatter, was my line of thinking. Either that, or my real-estate agent had ripped me off and given me the key to some stranger’s apartment, who was now cowering in their room hoping I would go away. Either way, I was tired, it was getting late, so I decided I didn’t really care. I at least had a lock on my room door, so I locked the main door, locked my room door, and went to sleep, hoping that would solve my problems. 

Well, it didn’t. About an hour later, and mind you, this is middle of the night, past midnight, I start to hear a banging on my front door. I mistake this for a dream, and try to go back to sleep. The banging continues as I slowly regain my awareness, however, and I start to hear yelling on top of it. “HEY! OPEN THE DOOR! WAKE UP! OPEN THE DAMN DOOR!”(ßAll in chinese). Well, I'm startin to come around at this point, but I decide to give somebody a call before I go opening my door to screaming lunatics at all hours of the night. Before I can call anybody, though, I notice my realestate agent has texted me telling me that the last tenant is at the front door, and has chosen this particular time of night to begin moving out. I am very confused by all of this, so I call my real-estate agent lady, and she says it’s cool to open the door, and to just let her in. So, against all my better judgement, I get up and open the door, wherupon I am confronted with this absolute mess of a woman in her late 20s, looking like she just lost a fight with some street sewage. She storms in, asks me which room I’m in, unlocks the other one (the fact that she had a key to the room was the only reason I wasn’t freaking out at this point), and proceeds to grab an armful of stuff, and head back out the front door, quick as she came. I thought to myself, “that was awfully odd. I am offput..” But then again, it wasn’t as though I could do anything about it really, so I decided the best thing to do was nothing at all, and start unpacking in my newly “vacated” main bedroom. So that is what I did. 

I look at it this way: Most people get jello-molds or flowers when they move into a new place, if anything at all. I, on the other hand, got a frenzied late-night visit from a crazy Chinese lady that undermined my sense of security. It's the little things in life like that that make you feel extra specialJ

A little more Apartment.

Hello, again. Long time no blog. Alright, so if I remember correctly, the last time I left off, I hadn’t yet found an apartment, and things were looking a little down. Well that seems as good a place to start back in as any other. Shortly after those first few days of looking, as I believe I mentioned, I had finally found an apartment, and the landlord had finally agreed to have me as a tenant! It was beautiful. It still didn’t make up for the 5 straight days of looking at terrible houses that cost a fortune, but hey, at least I was getting somewhere. Well, at least I thought I was. Turns out that night, which was a Thursday night, when I was supposed to sign the contract, the landlord decided that instead of renting their apartment to a “stupid, not-enough-like-me foreigner”(ßI’m guessing at her thought processes here)—she would rent it to a “close friend” at the last possible second and not tell me about it till the next day. Again, this is just conjecture, but this is how I believe her sudden change of heart unfolded that day:

(Scene)

sometime Thursday afternoon.

Landlord:(pacing back and forth in stubborn angst, thinking to herself) AH CRAP! I can’t believe I actually have to rent my precious apartment to this stupid, dirty foreigner! Woe be unto me! I must find a way to thwart this foreign invader!

(suddenly, the phone rings)

Some random person: (on the other line) Sorry, I think this is the wrong number…

Landlord: (realizing an opportunity, she quickly replies) NO! WAIT! DON’T GO! Do you like apartments, mister??? 

The guy on the phone: Umm..i don’t know. I guess…

Landlord: AMAZING!! I will give you mine right now! FOR FREE!!! Anything to deny this foreigner a place to stay, and at the same time make him feel out of place in a foreign land! I am EVIL!!!!

The guy on the phone: ok.

(End scene)

I assume that’s how it happened, anyway. But yeah, the next day I resumed my look for an apartment, but this time with a new real-estate business, thinking that at least some of my troubles might be attributed to my somewhat disorganized and confrontational real-estate agent. Lo and behold, the first place that we come across with the new agent was by far the best I had seen yet, and the price wasn’t insane. So I decided I was tired of looking, and told them I wanted it. The only down side was that I couldn’t move in until the next Tuesday (another 4 days) because the previous tenants had still not moved out. By that point, I wasn’t going to be dissuaded by a small thing like being homeless for a few more days, so I signed the contract that night, and thus concluded my long and arduous search for lodging.

Also, quick mention, Lucky for me, I have a friend that lives three floors above my new place, and they offered to let me sleep on their couch for the time between when my hotel reservation ran out and when I moved into my apartment (which ended up being about a week or so), so that was pretty great, having a place to not be homeless and all. Friends are cool.

apartment business.

Alright, so I've been in Nanjing now for a couple days. And for the most part, I've spent those two days looking for an apartment. If you didn't happen to know this, finding an apartment in Nanjing is not very easy this time of year, and being a foreigner as I am, it's just about that much less enjoyable. You'd be surprised how quickly people go from "curious" about foreign people to borderline xenophobic when some american wants to rent an apartment from them. I was lucky that I wasn't the first one here from IU, though, because I was able to get in contact with a real-estate agent the second I got in the door and start looking at houses. The lady that was in charge of this place, which by the way wasn't much bigger than your average hole in the wall, took me and Eric (one of my classmates) to see apartment after apartment for what ended up being a good portion of the day. We started out at about 9 or ten in the morning just walking to go see what some of our classmates had already found so that we could get an idea of what to expect and for how much, and then we proceeded to walk the streets and back-alleyways of nanjing for the next several hours, looking at places along the way that, sadly, seemed to be getting further and further from what we were looking for. At one point, our real-estate-agent-lady took us to a communist party and military retirement apartment complex, without telling the people we were foreigners beforehand. Well, once we got there, the guard sitting at the gate decided to take advantage of the situation and make a calm and rational decision to go bat-shit crazy at us for the next five minutes. We weren't even two steps off of the sidewalk before he starts frantically yelling at our real-estate agent about having foreigners even in the vicinity of the building. So she starts arguing with him that it's ok, she's just taking us to see an apartment, and he retorts that 'i don't care what you're showing them!!!, etc etc!!! you get the picture'. She's obviously not getting anywhere by arguing with the guy, but she waves us to come over anyways, which we do, reluctantly. The guy sees us coming over, and starts to shut the electric gate to the parking lot so even if we wanted to--which at that point we indeed did not--we couldn't walk  onto the premises, effectively driving home the point that "you are not welcome here". That was probably the worst of it yesterday, but the rest of the day wasn't really better by that much. We ended up looking at 5 or 6 apartments scattered all around our area of town, all of which were either overpriced by a large margin or in terrible condition, or both. We suspected this was either because we are foreigners (which are apparently always drunk, loud, and dirty), or because we were guys (i actually still don't really know why this is an issue, but the girls got quoted way lower numbers at the same places than the guys did, and on a pretty consistent basis, too). We actually heard a couple of the landlords saying things like "oh, yeah, they're foreigners, so we're raising the price" to our real-estate lady right in front of us, thinking that we couldn't speak Chinese. So yeah, the first day of apartment-looking didn't go very well to say the least, but I guess I did get a healthy amount of exercise, so take the good with the bad.