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.