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Welcome to Meishanyuan building 15!!

Note: my apartment is the topmost windows on the right :)

So now for a quick overview of my new living situation for the next year, complete with loads of pictures!! So a bit of background on my apartment, it has three bedrooms (one large, one medium, and one that is pretty small), one kitchen that is connected to an outdoor laundry area, one bathroom, a largish living room area, and a nice size balcony. Since Catherine and I are the only people living here, this means we have a spare bedroom for any guests that come! The apartment is on the fourth floor of building 15 in the Meishanyuan Apartment Compound located in the Meilin area of Futian District, which means it is north of most of the financial buildings and bustle of the downtown area. Meilin is a really nice residential area, where a lot of middle class Chinese families live. The area has tons of trees, and most of the buildings are residential, so our apartment is a bit far from most nightlife, and the metro. My apartment is located about 10-15 minutes from a Carrefour (a French version of Wal-Mart/Grocery store), 20 minutes walk from the closest metro (Xiangmei North), and is right across from a massive Agricultural Market. Overall the location isn’t so bad, but it is a bit far from my school, since it is a 20 minute car ride or a 30-40 minute bus ride, but overall it isn’t so bad.

Apartment 404 (my apartment)

Now for a few of the quirks, that comes with any apartment in China!!! Ok, so my apartment was actually decently supplied (in fact in some ways it is oversupplied) and everything worked, compare to many other people’s apartments. So what I mean by my apartment being oversupplied, is that I have not one, not two, but that’s right… three refrigerators (of course it needs to be mentioned that only one of them works!) The apartment also has two tvs on identical tv stands (of which one works), and two microwave machines (of which one works). Furthermore, there is also a new in box microwave, new in box television, and what seems to be a new in box washing machine (although I don’t know why we have these, since its not like appliances usually go on a buy one get one half price sale!) So our apartment is MORE than adequately supplied!!

Living Room

Overall the apartment is pretty comfortable as the air-conditioning units in the bedrooms work really well, our hot water heater works, we have a western toilet (unlike some people who have squat toilets [and are getting them replaced, because our contract states that we are to have a western toilet]), we also have a ton of books from previous teachers, a decent futon couch for the living room, tons of hangers, lots of cooking pots, bowls, utensils, and one rather grimy hot plate (which has since been replaced with a brand new one, because the old one broke J )

Our kitchen (Note that it hasn't been cleaned or organized yet)

Our bathroom (again it hasn't yet been cleaned)

The few minor annoyances, are that the beds are large, but hard (why, China, why can you not produce softer beds?!?!) Also, its not like we don’t have enough room in our apartment, but why leave all the broken things in the apartment??? Finally, we have curtains, but they are not very dark, and do a piss-poor job of blocking the morning sun, but seriously this isn’t a big deal (I just like to complain, lol)

All in all I’m pretty happy with my apartment, and the school has been really good, about supplying brand new sheets, a brand new pillow, and making sure everything works, and they taught us how to use the washing machine and tv!! Oh and I almost forgot to mention the highlight of the apartment, the holiest of holy grails…. We have WIFI!!!!! (my excitement knew no bounds when I found this out ;) ) Not only do we have wifi, but it is fast and I’ve been able to stream video and easily access my email ect (which after being deprived of decent internet access, at all the hotels we stayed at, this was amazing!!) Anyways, so I know the apartment looks a little sad in some of the pictures, but with a thorough cleaning, and some decoration of pictures or whatever, I think that it will look really good in a month or so :D 

And of course this post would not be complete without proof of our three refrigerators!! ;)