Showing posts with label daily life. Show all posts
Showing posts with label daily life. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Bubble Fun
Little Fish
Apart from spending time with cousins, swimming in Grandma and Grandpa Childs' backyard pool has already become the highlight of Seth's summer in the States. Last year Seth loved being thrown up in the air while in the pool, or jumping off the deck and into some lucky relative's waiting arms, but this year he prefers to jump into the pool without being caught. This, of course, means that he goes under water quite often, but he is starting to learn to hold his breath and close his eyes. He is also able to paddle around a little bit when he is wearing his swimsuit with the flotation top. It's great to see him loving the water!
Monday, June 14, 2010
Friday, April 23, 2010
Springtime
Spring has come to Beijing! It has been a late spring, and the weather has remained cool, but we are finally beginning to see an increase in temperature. The grass is getting a little greener, flowers are growing, and we've all switched from coats to jackets.We are especially excited that a new and very large grocery store will soon be opening across the street from us. People have been working on the building all winter, and rumor has it that it will open next weekend. We are really hoping that they will have fresh milk and cheese, two items we seem to be unable to live without but which are hard to find in smaller grocery stores. It will also be nice to be able to walk to a grocery store rather than having to take a bus.
Saturday, March 27, 2010
A Framing Experience
Last year over our break for the Chinese New Year we went to Liulichang, a traditional Chinese shopping street, and picked up some four seasons artwork. These types of paintings are very common in China, but the set we found was different from most in that the colors are quite vibrant rather than being muted. We spent all the cash we had on hand to buy them so that we had to take a bus home rather than a taxi, but it was easily worth it. We kept the artwork rolled up and tucked away in boxes and looked forward to the day when we could have them framed and hung on our walls.
After we had moved into our new apartment last fall, I found an article in an English language magazine called Time Out describing different framing shops in the city. The author of the piece highly recommended a place called Today Photo and said they are the best place in Beijing for the price. Last month we went there with a student of mine, Tracy, to get our paintings framed, and imagine my surprise when they told me they couldn't do it. They said they could only cut one hole out of each mat. Now, I think that's pretty silly. Isn't the definition of a framing shop a shop that frame things (emphasis on the plural)? I don't know if they were trying to get more money out of us by encouraging us to frame each picture separately, but if that was their strategy, it didn't work: we just walked out the door. I was pretty frustrated with the shop, but even more so with the magazine. If you recommend a framing shop in print, it really ought to be a decent shop, or you should let your readers know the limits to what they can do. Then we wouldn't have wasted my student's time and the $12 for the round-trip taxi ride.
Anyway, Tracy thought we should try a photo print shop right next to campus. She said she had recently taken something there to be framed and that they had done a good job with it. So we nervously took our beautiful artwork to this rinky-dink little photo place, picked out a frame, and were told to come back in three days. It cost significantly less than it would have at Today Photo, and though I'm not completely satisfied (the paintings seem only to be mounted from the top, so they aren't completely flat), it is nice to finally have some artwork on the walls. Of course, now the stark whiteness of the walls stands out even more...
After we had moved into our new apartment last fall, I found an article in an English language magazine called Time Out describing different framing shops in the city. The author of the piece highly recommended a place called Today Photo and said they are the best place in Beijing for the price. Last month we went there with a student of mine, Tracy, to get our paintings framed, and imagine my surprise when they told me they couldn't do it. They said they could only cut one hole out of each mat. Now, I think that's pretty silly. Isn't the definition of a framing shop a shop that frame things (emphasis on the plural)? I don't know if they were trying to get more money out of us by encouraging us to frame each picture separately, but if that was their strategy, it didn't work: we just walked out the door. I was pretty frustrated with the shop, but even more so with the magazine. If you recommend a framing shop in print, it really ought to be a decent shop, or you should let your readers know the limits to what they can do. Then we wouldn't have wasted my student's time and the $12 for the round-trip taxi ride.
Anyway, Tracy thought we should try a photo print shop right next to campus. She said she had recently taken something there to be framed and that they had done a good job with it. So we nervously took our beautiful artwork to this rinky-dink little photo place, picked out a frame, and were told to come back in three days. It cost significantly less than it would have at Today Photo, and though I'm not completely satisfied (the paintings seem only to be mounted from the top, so they aren't completely flat), it is nice to finally have some artwork on the walls. Of course, now the stark whiteness of the walls stands out even more...
Saturday, March 13, 2010
No Shame
Seth is in that phase where he loves to run around the house naked, but after his bath today he decided running around the house wasn't good enough. He climbed up on the bay window in Mommy and Daddy's bedroom and proceded to strut his stuff for anyone who cared to see. Ah, to be so uninhibited!
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
The Box
Guess what Seth put into his new toybox that we couldn't find for the longest time. His favorite toys? His collection of play food? Daddy's glasses? The remote controls? Maybe the broccoli he didn't want to eat for dinner? Scroll down to see...
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
The Bank
I can’t tell you the number of times I have had a strange or inexplicable experience in China and thought, “I really must blog about this.” I think most of our readers (excluding my in-laws) would probably prefer to read about our China adventures rather than see picture after picture of Seth, no matter how cute those pictures are. Well, today I had one such experience, and since I am dreadfully behind on lesson planning anyway, I thought I would take the time to tell you about it and get even further behind.
After moving into our new apartment, I discovered that I really couldn’t find a lot of the things I was looking for in the stores, or when I could, I thought they were substantially overpriced. (As an example, coffee makers at the Chinese version of Circuit City cost about $100. That’s U.S. dollars, not R.M.B.) I found myself spending more and more time on Amazon.com searching for the items I wanted, which wasn’t really a viable option anyway since Amazon doesn’t ship most of its stuff internationally and charges an arm and a leg when they do. Benjamin’s language partner suggested that we look at TaoBao.com, China’s version of eBay. Now, I would love to tell you that my written Chinese has improved to such an extent that I am able to shop on TaoBao.com unaided, but the truth is that nearly all of the credit goes to the Google toolbar translator. But with my bad Chinese and the Google translator, I was soon navigating around the site and finding some of the things I was looking for.
Well, it might have been better if I hadn’t been able to find anything I wanted to buy because that’s when the trouble began. I put a few things in my cart, like a sewing machine and a coffee maker and an electric drill and went to check out. And that’s when I ran into problem number one: they don’t take international credit cards. Instead, I have to use AliPay, a program similar to PayPal in the States, which transfers money directly from a bank to the TaoBao seller. Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad; I’ll just sign up. After all, I have an account at one of the three largest Chinese banks, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Oh, but it is. Problem number two: you can’t sign up for AliPay online; you have to go to the bank to do it.
Benjamin asked a student to go with us to the bank to help us set up such an account. It didn’t take long at all. We paid 30 R.M.B. for a little thing that looks like a flash drive. Before we left the bank an employee there downloaded all the necessary files and helped me set up a password. I got home and pulled up TaoBao to pay for the items I had already agreed to purchase. I inserted my flash drive at the appropriate time and then problem number three reared its ugly head: my password was incorrect. Now, I can tell you that I was completely, totally, 100%, no-doubt-about-it certain of my password. I had entered it three times while at the bank, and it wasn’t something I would forget. I tried again. And again. And again. And then I was locked out.
So yesterday I asked another student to go back to the bank with me to get my flash drive reactivated and hopefully find out what went wrong. I met him there around two o’clock. We got our number and waited for maybe fifteen minutes. When it was our turn, we went up to the window, and Joe explained the situation. No problem, they assured us. We can do that, they promised. Just hand over your bank card and passport, they said, and we will be happy to oblige.
The bank associate looked over my things, swiped my bank card, had me enter my ATM code—pretty routine stuff. But then his boss wandered over and started looking over his shoulder. And his boss said, “The name on your account is different from the name on your passport.”
“Huh?” I said.
“Your passport says ‘SCHILLER’ here and ‘LAURIE ELAINE’ here, but your account says “LAURIE SCHILLER.”
“Oh, well, nobody ever uses their middle names in the States, and our surnames come last.”
“Well, this is China, and it needs to be done the Chinese way.”
True, the Chinese put their family name first and their given names last, but they also call people by their family names rather than their given names, so it kind of makes sense. Regardless, why is this coming up now when I opened this account a year and a half ago? Why does it even matter? I’m obviously who I say I am; I have the signed passport to prove it, and the signature on the back of my bank card matches it, and here are my credit cards that say “Laurie Schiller” on them and have my signature on the back too, and I can sign something else to prove it to you if you want me to.
Have I mentioned that this counts as problem number four?
The bank employees decided that the name on my account needed to be changed to SCHILLER LAURIE ELAINE. Now, this wouldn’t really be that big of a problem if they would just change it in their computer and let me get on with my life. But instead they had to close my old account and open a new one for me. This involved filling out about ten forms—all in Chinese, of course—and waiting about an hour. Then after I had filled out and signed all the forms, they asked me why I had signed my name incorrectly.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “That’s how I sign my name.”
Yep, they made me redo all the forms, this time signing them Schiller Laurie Elaine, which is NOT my name, but I didn’t really care at that point.
Now we are running out of time because Joe has class at 3:40. I figured since we were about done with this name change business, we could get the flash drive reactivated and be on our way. Ha! That would be all too easy. Problem number five: “We’re sorry. There’s been some kind of system error and the bank is unable to issue you a new account at this time. Please come again in three to five business days.”
And that’s all the explanation I got. I don’t even know if I can withdraw money from my account between now and when I go back or even if my money is still in existence.
Joe apologized as we were leaving, which was sweet of him. He said even Chinese people have a hard time communicating with bank officials. He was worried that the experience had changed my opinion of China.
While we were waiting at the bank, Joe asked me why I had come to China. It’s a common enough question, and a valid one too. I have a stock answer that I like to give when people ask me that. It’s close to the truth without setting off any warning signals. But when Joe asked me today, I just said, “I don’t know, Joe. Sometimes I really don’t know.”
After moving into our new apartment, I discovered that I really couldn’t find a lot of the things I was looking for in the stores, or when I could, I thought they were substantially overpriced. (As an example, coffee makers at the Chinese version of Circuit City cost about $100. That’s U.S. dollars, not R.M.B.) I found myself spending more and more time on Amazon.com searching for the items I wanted, which wasn’t really a viable option anyway since Amazon doesn’t ship most of its stuff internationally and charges an arm and a leg when they do. Benjamin’s language partner suggested that we look at TaoBao.com, China’s version of eBay. Now, I would love to tell you that my written Chinese has improved to such an extent that I am able to shop on TaoBao.com unaided, but the truth is that nearly all of the credit goes to the Google toolbar translator. But with my bad Chinese and the Google translator, I was soon navigating around the site and finding some of the things I was looking for.
Well, it might have been better if I hadn’t been able to find anything I wanted to buy because that’s when the trouble began. I put a few things in my cart, like a sewing machine and a coffee maker and an electric drill and went to check out. And that’s when I ran into problem number one: they don’t take international credit cards. Instead, I have to use AliPay, a program similar to PayPal in the States, which transfers money directly from a bank to the TaoBao seller. Okay, that doesn’t sound too bad; I’ll just sign up. After all, I have an account at one of the three largest Chinese banks, so it shouldn’t be a problem. Oh, but it is. Problem number two: you can’t sign up for AliPay online; you have to go to the bank to do it.
Benjamin asked a student to go with us to the bank to help us set up such an account. It didn’t take long at all. We paid 30 R.M.B. for a little thing that looks like a flash drive. Before we left the bank an employee there downloaded all the necessary files and helped me set up a password. I got home and pulled up TaoBao to pay for the items I had already agreed to purchase. I inserted my flash drive at the appropriate time and then problem number three reared its ugly head: my password was incorrect. Now, I can tell you that I was completely, totally, 100%, no-doubt-about-it certain of my password. I had entered it three times while at the bank, and it wasn’t something I would forget. I tried again. And again. And again. And then I was locked out.
So yesterday I asked another student to go back to the bank with me to get my flash drive reactivated and hopefully find out what went wrong. I met him there around two o’clock. We got our number and waited for maybe fifteen minutes. When it was our turn, we went up to the window, and Joe explained the situation. No problem, they assured us. We can do that, they promised. Just hand over your bank card and passport, they said, and we will be happy to oblige.
The bank associate looked over my things, swiped my bank card, had me enter my ATM code—pretty routine stuff. But then his boss wandered over and started looking over his shoulder. And his boss said, “The name on your account is different from the name on your passport.”
“Huh?” I said.
“Your passport says ‘SCHILLER’ here and ‘LAURIE ELAINE’ here, but your account says “LAURIE SCHILLER.”
“Oh, well, nobody ever uses their middle names in the States, and our surnames come last.”
“Well, this is China, and it needs to be done the Chinese way.”
True, the Chinese put their family name first and their given names last, but they also call people by their family names rather than their given names, so it kind of makes sense. Regardless, why is this coming up now when I opened this account a year and a half ago? Why does it even matter? I’m obviously who I say I am; I have the signed passport to prove it, and the signature on the back of my bank card matches it, and here are my credit cards that say “Laurie Schiller” on them and have my signature on the back too, and I can sign something else to prove it to you if you want me to.
Have I mentioned that this counts as problem number four?
The bank employees decided that the name on my account needed to be changed to SCHILLER LAURIE ELAINE. Now, this wouldn’t really be that big of a problem if they would just change it in their computer and let me get on with my life. But instead they had to close my old account and open a new one for me. This involved filling out about ten forms—all in Chinese, of course—and waiting about an hour. Then after I had filled out and signed all the forms, they asked me why I had signed my name incorrectly.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “That’s how I sign my name.”
Yep, they made me redo all the forms, this time signing them Schiller Laurie Elaine, which is NOT my name, but I didn’t really care at that point.
Now we are running out of time because Joe has class at 3:40. I figured since we were about done with this name change business, we could get the flash drive reactivated and be on our way. Ha! That would be all too easy. Problem number five: “We’re sorry. There’s been some kind of system error and the bank is unable to issue you a new account at this time. Please come again in three to five business days.”
And that’s all the explanation I got. I don’t even know if I can withdraw money from my account between now and when I go back or even if my money is still in existence.
Joe apologized as we were leaving, which was sweet of him. He said even Chinese people have a hard time communicating with bank officials. He was worried that the experience had changed my opinion of China.
While we were waiting at the bank, Joe asked me why I had come to China. It’s a common enough question, and a valid one too. I have a stock answer that I like to give when people ask me that. It’s close to the truth without setting off any warning signals. But when Joe asked me today, I just said, “I don’t know, Joe. Sometimes I really don’t know.”
Sunday, December 13, 2009
2009 Christmas Newsletter
The season between Thanksgiving and the New Year is a time of looking back and looking forward. We look back on the things we are grateful for and remember the previous year. We look forward to Christmas (you know, Advent) and look to the promises the New Year brings. We are first of all thankful for all our friends and family in America who remember us every day or week. Whether sending an e-mail or a message on Facebook, mailing a Christmas card or calling us on Skype, we feel your love and appreciate your thoughts on our behalf.We are also very thankful for our new apartment. There has been a lot of drama concerning this apartment (check out Laurie’s epic posts below) but we are finally getting settled into our new place and making it home. Seth has a ton of room to run around in and has his own play area. We finally have a full-sized kitchen with a very expensive oven that we had to purchase ourselves. It has totally been worth every dollar as we’ve had cookies, cakes, brownies, and casseroles, and for Christmas dinner we’ll have home-made manicotti and New York style cheesecake.
The best part of the new apartment is that it has allowed us to actually have guests over. Our old place was small, dirty, and had a gatekeeper downstairs to keep all non-teachers out. We were in a “guest house.” Not so here. In fact, we had several Chinese friends over to a Thanksgiving dinner. Laurie did a fabulous job getting it as close to an American dinner as possible, only with chicken instead of turkey. We even went around the table to say what we were each thankful for.
While Laurie has taught previously, Benjamin is finishing his first year teaching. It isn’t something that he chose as a career, but he has adapted fairly quickly and is enjoying it, especially teaching business math. Both of us seem to like it here and plan on staying for awhile, though Laurie finds routine job searching cathartic for dealing with the pressures of the job. Seth continues to grow and learn. He is always amazing us with the things he understands and is able to do. We are grateful for his experience growing up in two cultures. It won’t be long until he surpasses us in his Chinese, though right now he is still simply processing the dual language environment.As we look to the next year, Laurie and Benjamin will be celebrating their five-year anniversary with a trip to Sanya in Hainan Province. (Hainan is called “the Hawaii of China.”) Seth will start pre-school in the fall and hopefully make a lot of new friends. We also hope to continue with our teaching jobs and, most importantly, develop more and deeper friendships with both Chinese and foreigners.
While many American Christians complain about the secularization and commercialization of Christmas, here in China we are thrilled to see any signs of the holiday. It’s hard to believe Christmas will be here next week when, unlike most of you, we haven’t been looking at apartment store decorations and listening to carols played over loudspeakers since October. We have to remind ourselves every day that the season of Christ’s birth is upon us, and in the spirit of joy and peace that our Savior has brought us, we wish you all a very Merry Christmas and the happiest of New Years.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
The Housing Crisis Ends
Benjamin and I were given the keys to our new apartment a matter of hours ago! The school finally lowered the price so that we are now paying about $300 per month--a very reasonable fee, in our opinion--for either size apartment. (We chose the bigger one.) The lower price generated enough interest among the faculty that the plan was given the go-ahead. We already took a load over (meaning four or so bags that we could carry on our person) and checked it out.
Though the the place is furnished, it is still a little sparse, so I will have a lot of fun fixing it up. And there is some furniture we still want to buy, such as dressers, a china cabinet, and some shelves for Seth's toys. We're also considering buying an oven, though they are crazy expensive here in China. The cheapest I've found is one at IKEA that measures 2 feet by 2 feet by 2 feet (on the outside!) and costs $1,000. Then I will get to work decorating: hanging pictures on the walls, picking out curtains and carpets, arranging knickknacks, and so forth. It's going to be a busy but exciting couple of weeks, and I hope to have everything close to done by Thanksgiving so that we can invite a few people over.
Though the the place is furnished, it is still a little sparse, so I will have a lot of fun fixing it up. And there is some furniture we still want to buy, such as dressers, a china cabinet, and some shelves for Seth's toys. We're also considering buying an oven, though they are crazy expensive here in China. The cheapest I've found is one at IKEA that measures 2 feet by 2 feet by 2 feet (on the outside!) and costs $1,000. Then I will get to work decorating: hanging pictures on the walls, picking out curtains and carpets, arranging knickknacks, and so forth. It's going to be a busy but exciting couple of weeks, and I hope to have everything close to done by Thanksgiving so that we can invite a few people over.
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
The Housing Crisis, Part 2
Is anybody still reading? Yikes! I bored myself with that last spiel. But I might as well finish the story, right?
So we went to Dean Feng to let him know that we were planning to move off campus, and lo and behold, he tells us that the price of the apartments is 50 R.M.B. per usable square meter versus overall square meters. This lowered the price of the apartments significantly, though they would still be more expensive than the off-campus apartment we had found. The big plus was the convenience. I have four eight o'clock classes this semester, and if you know me at all you know that I'm not Miss Suzy Sunshine in the wee hours of the morning. The apartment we had found was north of campus and about a fifteen-minute bus ride away, but that was once you actually got on the bus and didn't count the fifteen minutes or more you could spend waiting for it. And if traffic happened to be a lot worse on any particular day, that could lengthen the drive as well. So suddenly I am having to leave home at 6:45 to be sure to get to school by 7:30. And we like living on campus. As much as we complain about not having a kitchen, it really is nice to just be able to walk over to the cafeteria for lunch or dinner. It's easy to get to class and meetings; my boss is always calling me to her office to pick up or drop off this or that, and doing so would be so much more difficult if we lived off campus. The higher price tag on the on-campus apartments was starting to appear more reasonable.
So we finally decided that, yes, we would live in the school's apartment if we could get one of the smaller apartments. It would be plenty big enough for our family and easily twice the size of where we are already living. Plus there was the possibility that we wouldn't have to sign a lease, so we could move out at any time. Now all we had to do was pray for patience!
The semester started and we attended another new semester orientation meeting. Dean Feng announced that the apartments would be finished within a week and that we would be able to move in by the end of the month. Why the delay? Well, the Chinese believe that when a building is built, there are all sorts of dangerous chemicals and toxins that go into the building and get stirred up in the air inside it, so after a building is finished, it has to simply sit there for two or three weeks. It's kind of funny; I don't know how they know when the poisons and toxins are gone, or where they go, or what would happen to you if you moved in before they had "settled," or why it's okay to move into a building full of toxins as long as you wait two or three weeks first, but that's beside the point. There is simply nothing we could do about it, and we had to wait.
On Friday of last week, Benjamin and I both received e-mails from our respective bosses telling us that anybody who was interested in living in the apartments should come to the office on Sunday morning to take a tour of them. In the afternoon we would have a meeting on housing allocation. Now to me, this sounded like the school was saying, "The apartments are ready and you will be given your keys on Sunday," or at least something along those lines. I'm sure you can imagine my response: this is going to be my best birthday ever!!! (Yes, Sunday was my birthday, or as Benjamin put it, the second anniversary of my twenty-ninth birthday.)
Sunday morning we did indeed take a tour of the apartments. I took a camera along to snap pictures so that I could start decorating in my head before we actually moved in. Overall I was very pleased. The furniture is a little on the cheap side, but it is all brand new, and whoever chose it did a good job picking out neutral items. From the moment I stepped in the door I was dreaming of where I would hang art and photos, where I would put candles and tablecloths, how I would arrange the kitchen, how many trips to IKEA I would have to make, etc.
So we went to Dean Feng to let him know that we were planning to move off campus, and lo and behold, he tells us that the price of the apartments is 50 R.M.B. per usable square meter versus overall square meters. This lowered the price of the apartments significantly, though they would still be more expensive than the off-campus apartment we had found. The big plus was the convenience. I have four eight o'clock classes this semester, and if you know me at all you know that I'm not Miss Suzy Sunshine in the wee hours of the morning. The apartment we had found was north of campus and about a fifteen-minute bus ride away, but that was once you actually got on the bus and didn't count the fifteen minutes or more you could spend waiting for it. And if traffic happened to be a lot worse on any particular day, that could lengthen the drive as well. So suddenly I am having to leave home at 6:45 to be sure to get to school by 7:30. And we like living on campus. As much as we complain about not having a kitchen, it really is nice to just be able to walk over to the cafeteria for lunch or dinner. It's easy to get to class and meetings; my boss is always calling me to her office to pick up or drop off this or that, and doing so would be so much more difficult if we lived off campus. The higher price tag on the on-campus apartments was starting to appear more reasonable.
So we finally decided that, yes, we would live in the school's apartment if we could get one of the smaller apartments. It would be plenty big enough for our family and easily twice the size of where we are already living. Plus there was the possibility that we wouldn't have to sign a lease, so we could move out at any time. Now all we had to do was pray for patience!
The semester started and we attended another new semester orientation meeting. Dean Feng announced that the apartments would be finished within a week and that we would be able to move in by the end of the month. Why the delay? Well, the Chinese believe that when a building is built, there are all sorts of dangerous chemicals and toxins that go into the building and get stirred up in the air inside it, so after a building is finished, it has to simply sit there for two or three weeks. It's kind of funny; I don't know how they know when the poisons and toxins are gone, or where they go, or what would happen to you if you moved in before they had "settled," or why it's okay to move into a building full of toxins as long as you wait two or three weeks first, but that's beside the point. There is simply nothing we could do about it, and we had to wait.
On Friday of last week, Benjamin and I both received e-mails from our respective bosses telling us that anybody who was interested in living in the apartments should come to the office on Sunday morning to take a tour of them. In the afternoon we would have a meeting on housing allocation. Now to me, this sounded like the school was saying, "The apartments are ready and you will be given your keys on Sunday," or at least something along those lines. I'm sure you can imagine my response: this is going to be my best birthday ever!!! (Yes, Sunday was my birthday, or as Benjamin put it, the second anniversary of my twenty-ninth birthday.)
Sunday morning we did indeed take a tour of the apartments. I took a camera along to snap pictures so that I could start decorating in my head before we actually moved in. Overall I was very pleased. The furniture is a little on the cheap side, but it is all brand new, and whoever chose it did a good job picking out neutral items. From the moment I stepped in the door I was dreaming of where I would hang art and photos, where I would put candles and tablecloths, how I would arrange the kitchen, how many trips to IKEA I would have to make, etc.
So I went to the afternoon meeting with a happy heart. Benjamin and I had already spoken with many of the other teachers, and it seemed like most people did not want to move into the apartments on campus. We knew there were only seven of the smaller apartments available, and that we were about middle of the patch as far as seniority, but we didn't think we really had any competition. The teachers who were already living off campus didn't want to move back, and the teachers who were living on campus in the guesthouse for free (like us) didn't want to have to start paying rent.
Now here's the thing: the guesthouse we are currently living in is not ICB's guesthouse. We are actually living in the China-Israeli Center for Agricultural Studies. ICB's guesthouse, which is a stone's throw from where we are currently living, was evacuated with plans for demolition before the 2008 Olympics. (Apparently you could see the ICB guesthouse when a camera did a pan of the Olympic wrestling stadium, which is on campus, and the Olympic committee thought it looked tacky on television. It was in pretty bad shape.) But it never got demolished. In fact, last spring when Dean Meng was making us his promises about the on-campus accommodations he also informed us that the ICB guesthouse was going to be rennovated and every teacher was going to get a shared office space. (This was welcome news as well, but I was much more excited about the apartments. I will, however, enjoy having a work office as Benjamin and I currently share just one desk in our apartment, and we don't have anywhere to meet with students for our obligatory office hours. The supposed deadline for that project is the end of October.)
After informing us that we would have to pay rent for the on-campus apartments, we were given a second option: to move into ICB's new guesthouse--the one our offices will be in--for free. However, the rooms are smaller than they are in the China-Israeli guesthouse, where we have the biggest of all the rooms, so living in the new ICB guesthouse wasn't really an option. Benjamin and I would each be able to get a room, but they would be smaller (about 200 square feet each), and we still wouldn't have a kitchen. Basically, it would be a huge downgrade for us. For the single teachers living on campus, however, it would be a lateral move.
So at the meeting on Sunday every teacher interested in on-campus housing was asked to fill out form to let the school know where they would like to live. We handed in our forms and waited while Deans Meng and Feng counted. As it turns out, Benjamin and I were the only ones willing to pay the price the school had set. Everybody else wanted free accommodation in the newly-renovated ICB guesthouse.
Sounds good, right? I mean, if we are the only family who wants to move in, then we would have our pick of apartments. Not only would we be able to get one of the smaller apartments, but we would also be able to choose which floor we wanted to live on. But as it turned out, there are not enough rooms in the ICB guesthouse to accommodate everybody who wants to live there. Their solution: we have to get China Agricultural University to drop the rent on the apartments so that more of our teachers are willing to move there.
That sounds good, too, right? I mean, in my mind I'm thinking, "Great! We can move in, pay the higher rent for a month while this gets settled, and then start paying a more reasonable amount." That's what a normal person would think, right? Wrong. Since I am middle of the pack for seniority, Dean Meng wouldn't let me choose an apartment. He said, "You will just pick the best apartment. If the university lowers the price and other teachers with higher seniority choose to move in, they should be able to choose before you do." Dean Feng was actually on my side. He said it was reasonable to allow our family to move in ahead of others with higher seniority because we were willing to pay a higher price. Dean Meng countered with "But Seth shouldn't be living in that building with all the bad air anyway!" I stifled a scream...
So that's the story of why we're still waiting, why we can't move next week while we are on vacation, and why I am so angry with ICB that I am thankful for gun control laws. Hopefully...hopefully...hopefully it isn't the end of the story and we will be moving soon. Even if CAU lowers the rent on the apartments, we think we'll still be able to get one. There simply aren't a lot of teachers who sound interested. Most of the teachers here are single and only stay for a year or two, so living in a little room and eating at the cafeteria isn't all that bad if it's free and if it isn't for the rest of your life. We, on the other hand, might grow old in this stupid apartment; it does seem to have some kind of magnetic power over us. But hey, at least we're not breathing all that bad air. No, we just have to live with smog as bad as this:
Monday, September 28, 2009
The Housing Crisis, Part 1
It's a really long story, and you certainly don't have to read it, but if you are at all interested in why our family is still living in a 500 square foot apartment, with only one bedroom and no kitchen, read on...
When we first came to China fall of 2008, we planned to live in our school's guesthouse for a month or so while we looked for our own place. The room we were given in the guesthouse was bigger than average, but it was just a sitting room and a bedroom. The bedroom had room for one double bed and space to walk next to it. The sitting room had a couch and a wardrobe. It wasn't a place we wanted to live long-term.
Two or three days after moving in, the school offered us a larger apartment with a decent-sized living room and a much larger bedroom--room for a bed, a wardrobe, and a crib in this one. I was hesitant to take it since we were planning to move off campus within a couple of weeks. I mean, the apartment they showed us was a big improvement over the one we were already living in, but it was still pretty yucky and tiny, and I just didn't think it was worth it to move everything. Well, Benjamin was pretty convinced that it was worth it to upgrade to the larger place even if we would only be staying there for a couple of weeks, and since he said he would do the moving while I worked on lesson planning, I agreed. (Incidentally, this was an act of submission on my part; yes, feminists in egalitarian relationships can and do practice the fine art of submission!)
Well, it turned out to be a smart thing to do because moving off campus was going to have to be postponed. We found out that landlords in China typically require tenants to pay three to six months' rent at a time, in addition to a hefty security deposit. We had only brought enough cash to China to make it to my first pay day, which we had misunderstood to be the twentieth of the month. (Actually, it turned out to be the twenty-eighth. The Chinese accent makes it really hard to distinguish these two numbers.) Then when I finally did get paid we squandered pretty much all our money buying a washing machine since we had previously had to wash everything by hand or take our clothing to a shop off-campus where they charged us per item to launder our clothes for us and our clothes came back with tags stapled into them that hurt like the dickens and were really hard to take off, too. Oh, yeah, and we bought a microwave and DVD player, too.
After that, we thought we should be able to move out between semesters. I had a month off starting in mid-January, and we thought that by then we would be able to save up enough money. I mentioned this to my boss and she discouraged us from moving off campus since (a) it's a big hassle with loads of paperwork and oodles of long lines to stand in and (b) the school was working on getting us better accommodations. Plus we were getting kind of used to where we were, small as it was, and liked the idea of saving so much money (where we live now is rent-free), and we thought we could stick it out until the end of the school year.
Spring semester began. All the teachers at ICB were invited to an orientation meeting. At this meeting the dean of our school stood in front of us all and gave us this speech:
"It really is a shame that our teachers, some of the best teachers in Beijing, teachers who have come to Beijing from all over the world, are living in the accommodations we have provided. Our teachers are living in single rooms while teachers at other universities are given entire apartments. Our teachers don't have kitchens; they have to eat in the school cafeteria with the students or go out to eat every single day. Our teachers don't have the quality of life they would have if they worked in their home countries or even at other universities in Beijing, and for this I apologize.
"Building 41, on the north side of campus, is an apartment building recently constructed for full professors at China Agricultural University. CAU has allocated twenty-one of these apartments to ICB. Two teachers will share each apartment, so there will be room for forty-two full-time teachers. The apartments are 1300 and 1500 square feet in size, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a spacious living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a study. The apartments will be ready for you to move into on May 1."
(Okay, so it wasn't nearly as eloquent as all that. Imagine the above with lots of inappropriate pauses, a really, really thick accent, tons of grammatical errors, and none of the big words, and that's what we heard.)
And then they showed us these gorgeous computer generated photos.
I was thrilled to pieces. Benjamin was thrilled that I was thrilled.
May 1 came and went, which wasn't really that big of a deal. I mean, in China deadlines are understood to be flexible, and though it frustrated me because I thought Dean Meng should have known better than to promise us the new apartments by a certain date, I knew that I simply had to be patient. You simply can't rush the Chinese.
Near the end of May we discovered that Seth could climb out of his crib. But we had a problem: no room for a toddler bed in our little bedroom. We went to the dean in charge of the apartments, Dean Feng, and explained the situation. We told him that we appreciated that the school was getting these apartments ready for us but that if they couldn't be ready in a couple of weeks we simply had to move off-campus in order to have a safe place for Seth to sleep. He promised us that the apartments would be ready by the time we left for the States mid-July. Benjamin and I didn't really know what to do, but ultimately we stayed put. It seemed silly to move off-campus for a couple of weeks and have to pay rent over the summer when we would be gone. We moved Seth into our bed (which he didn't mind one bit!) and started getting a lot lower quality of sleep.
As we were getting ready to return to the States for the summer, we made a point to speak with Dean Feng and ask him about the progress on the apartments. He said they would most certainly be done by the time we returned from abroad.
Then, one week while we were visiting friends in Kentucky, I received an e-mail from my boss Joyce. She wrote that she had finally been given the price of the apartments. I cannot stress to you enough that we had no idea before this point that the apartments would not be included as part of our compensation. No one had told us or even hinted to us otherwise. In fact, the exact opposite had been implied, if not expressly stated.
Furthermore, the price of the apartments was outrageous: $900 and $1,100 per month for the smaller and larger apartments, respectively. Many of our fellow teachers were already renting apartments off campus, and they typically paid $400 to $500 per month. The apartments on campus were larger, but we certainly didn't need 1300 square feet of living space. After all, our apartment in Kentucky had been only 750 or maybe 800 square feet.
Now we were filled with questions. Why was the school charging us for the apartments when at the new semester orientation meeting they had been presented as part of our benefits? Why were these apartments so expensive, to the degree that they were priced about twice as much as we thought would have been reasonable? And most of all, why had we been discouraged from moving off campus if we would have been better off financially that way anyway? The amazing thing about China is that we will never get an answer to any of these questions. Saving face is an important part of Chinese culture, so we can't simply go to Dean Meng or Dean Feng and accuse them of trying to exploit us. We can't even really ask them any pointed questions. All we can do is speculate with our colleagues, which we have done aplenty.
We returned to Beijing determined to find our own place off campus. After toying with the idea of me quitting my job (I hadn't signed a contract, Benjamin had, and we could live off his salary until I found something new) we realized that it would be better to continue working while looking for a new position. I started looking online for apartments, and we visited some rental agencies in some areas where we would like to live. After looking at ten or so apartments, we found one we were very happy with--the rent was about $450 per month--and we told the realtor that we would be back the next day with a Chinese friend who could help us communicate. If we received favorable answers to our questions (for example, we wanted the landlord to replace or at least remove the couch, which was gross), then we would sign a lease. But before doing that we thought we would go see Dean Feng and let him know our plans. After, we had been bugging him for months regarding when the apartments would be ready, and now we weren't even going to live in them. As angry as we were, we thought it was a good idea. I think we also felt the need to tell him that we were disappointed with how the situation had turned out, even if that did mean that he would lose face.
I told you it was a long story!! I'm going to have to take a break because Seth needs to go to bed. I'll try to finish up the saga soon!
When we first came to China fall of 2008, we planned to live in our school's guesthouse for a month or so while we looked for our own place. The room we were given in the guesthouse was bigger than average, but it was just a sitting room and a bedroom. The bedroom had room for one double bed and space to walk next to it. The sitting room had a couch and a wardrobe. It wasn't a place we wanted to live long-term.
Two or three days after moving in, the school offered us a larger apartment with a decent-sized living room and a much larger bedroom--room for a bed, a wardrobe, and a crib in this one. I was hesitant to take it since we were planning to move off campus within a couple of weeks. I mean, the apartment they showed us was a big improvement over the one we were already living in, but it was still pretty yucky and tiny, and I just didn't think it was worth it to move everything. Well, Benjamin was pretty convinced that it was worth it to upgrade to the larger place even if we would only be staying there for a couple of weeks, and since he said he would do the moving while I worked on lesson planning, I agreed. (Incidentally, this was an act of submission on my part; yes, feminists in egalitarian relationships can and do practice the fine art of submission!)
Well, it turned out to be a smart thing to do because moving off campus was going to have to be postponed. We found out that landlords in China typically require tenants to pay three to six months' rent at a time, in addition to a hefty security deposit. We had only brought enough cash to China to make it to my first pay day, which we had misunderstood to be the twentieth of the month. (Actually, it turned out to be the twenty-eighth. The Chinese accent makes it really hard to distinguish these two numbers.) Then when I finally did get paid we squandered pretty much all our money buying a washing machine since we had previously had to wash everything by hand or take our clothing to a shop off-campus where they charged us per item to launder our clothes for us and our clothes came back with tags stapled into them that hurt like the dickens and were really hard to take off, too. Oh, yeah, and we bought a microwave and DVD player, too.
After that, we thought we should be able to move out between semesters. I had a month off starting in mid-January, and we thought that by then we would be able to save up enough money. I mentioned this to my boss and she discouraged us from moving off campus since (a) it's a big hassle with loads of paperwork and oodles of long lines to stand in and (b) the school was working on getting us better accommodations. Plus we were getting kind of used to where we were, small as it was, and liked the idea of saving so much money (where we live now is rent-free), and we thought we could stick it out until the end of the school year.
Spring semester began. All the teachers at ICB were invited to an orientation meeting. At this meeting the dean of our school stood in front of us all and gave us this speech:
"It really is a shame that our teachers, some of the best teachers in Beijing, teachers who have come to Beijing from all over the world, are living in the accommodations we have provided. Our teachers are living in single rooms while teachers at other universities are given entire apartments. Our teachers don't have kitchens; they have to eat in the school cafeteria with the students or go out to eat every single day. Our teachers don't have the quality of life they would have if they worked in their home countries or even at other universities in Beijing, and for this I apologize.
"Building 41, on the north side of campus, is an apartment building recently constructed for full professors at China Agricultural University. CAU has allocated twenty-one of these apartments to ICB. Two teachers will share each apartment, so there will be room for forty-two full-time teachers. The apartments are 1300 and 1500 square feet in size, with two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a spacious living room, a dining room, a kitchen, and a study. The apartments will be ready for you to move into on May 1."
(Okay, so it wasn't nearly as eloquent as all that. Imagine the above with lots of inappropriate pauses, a really, really thick accent, tons of grammatical errors, and none of the big words, and that's what we heard.)
And then they showed us these gorgeous computer generated photos.
I was thrilled to pieces. Benjamin was thrilled that I was thrilled.
May 1 came and went, which wasn't really that big of a deal. I mean, in China deadlines are understood to be flexible, and though it frustrated me because I thought Dean Meng should have known better than to promise us the new apartments by a certain date, I knew that I simply had to be patient. You simply can't rush the Chinese.
Near the end of May we discovered that Seth could climb out of his crib. But we had a problem: no room for a toddler bed in our little bedroom. We went to the dean in charge of the apartments, Dean Feng, and explained the situation. We told him that we appreciated that the school was getting these apartments ready for us but that if they couldn't be ready in a couple of weeks we simply had to move off-campus in order to have a safe place for Seth to sleep. He promised us that the apartments would be ready by the time we left for the States mid-July. Benjamin and I didn't really know what to do, but ultimately we stayed put. It seemed silly to move off-campus for a couple of weeks and have to pay rent over the summer when we would be gone. We moved Seth into our bed (which he didn't mind one bit!) and started getting a lot lower quality of sleep.
As we were getting ready to return to the States for the summer, we made a point to speak with Dean Feng and ask him about the progress on the apartments. He said they would most certainly be done by the time we returned from abroad.
Then, one week while we were visiting friends in Kentucky, I received an e-mail from my boss Joyce. She wrote that she had finally been given the price of the apartments. I cannot stress to you enough that we had no idea before this point that the apartments would not be included as part of our compensation. No one had told us or even hinted to us otherwise. In fact, the exact opposite had been implied, if not expressly stated.
Furthermore, the price of the apartments was outrageous: $900 and $1,100 per month for the smaller and larger apartments, respectively. Many of our fellow teachers were already renting apartments off campus, and they typically paid $400 to $500 per month. The apartments on campus were larger, but we certainly didn't need 1300 square feet of living space. After all, our apartment in Kentucky had been only 750 or maybe 800 square feet.
Now we were filled with questions. Why was the school charging us for the apartments when at the new semester orientation meeting they had been presented as part of our benefits? Why were these apartments so expensive, to the degree that they were priced about twice as much as we thought would have been reasonable? And most of all, why had we been discouraged from moving off campus if we would have been better off financially that way anyway? The amazing thing about China is that we will never get an answer to any of these questions. Saving face is an important part of Chinese culture, so we can't simply go to Dean Meng or Dean Feng and accuse them of trying to exploit us. We can't even really ask them any pointed questions. All we can do is speculate with our colleagues, which we have done aplenty.
We returned to Beijing determined to find our own place off campus. After toying with the idea of me quitting my job (I hadn't signed a contract, Benjamin had, and we could live off his salary until I found something new) we realized that it would be better to continue working while looking for a new position. I started looking online for apartments, and we visited some rental agencies in some areas where we would like to live. After looking at ten or so apartments, we found one we were very happy with--the rent was about $450 per month--and we told the realtor that we would be back the next day with a Chinese friend who could help us communicate. If we received favorable answers to our questions (for example, we wanted the landlord to replace or at least remove the couch, which was gross), then we would sign a lease. But before doing that we thought we would go see Dean Feng and let him know our plans. After, we had been bugging him for months regarding when the apartments would be ready, and now we weren't even going to live in them. As angry as we were, we thought it was a good idea. I think we also felt the need to tell him that we were disappointed with how the situation had turned out, even if that did mean that he would lose face.
I told you it was a long story!! I'm going to have to take a break because Seth needs to go to bed. I'll try to finish up the saga soon!
Monday, August 24, 2009
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Fun in the Sun
Though the weather hasn't been stifling hot, Seth and Benjamin have still gotten quite a bit of use out of Grandma and Grandpa Childs' pool. Seth loves jumping into the pool from the deck and doesn't always give Daddy the heads up he should. And splashing and being thrown in the air are good fun, too! I wouldn't necessarily call him a natural in the water--he doesn't like to let go of Benjamin even though he wears a suit with a built-in life vest--but he's certainly not afraid of it either. On several occassions he has simply refused to get out of the pool even when his teeth were chattering. We'll miss the pool when we are back in Beijing, but hopefully the dog days of summer will be over by then.
Wednesday, August 12, 2009
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Noodles
I love Chinese noodles, and what I love most about them is the many different varieties and styles you can get. There's thin noodles and fat noodles, round noodles and flat noodles, vegetarian noodles and meat noodles, hand-stretched noodles and pressed noodles, wheat noodles and rice noodles, and on and on. One of our favorite noodle places is just outside the school's west gate, where we can get two giant bowls of noodles for a couple dollars. (Seth goes through phases when he loves noodles and inhales them and other times when he won't touch them, so we usually just order two bowls to begin with.) You can see in the picture below how excited Seth was when we were on the way.
The plastic things that you can see hanging in the doorway are just there to be a nuisance, as far was we can tell. I always feel like I am walking through a car wash when I enter a building. When we ask the Chinese about them, they say things like, "Aren't they convenient?" I'm really not sure what they're comparing them to when they say this--a giant boulder? What they really mean to say is that they would rather swoosh the plastic things away than have to open a door. To each his or her own.
The plastic things that you can see hanging in the doorway are just there to be a nuisance, as far was we can tell. I always feel like I am walking through a car wash when I enter a building. When we ask the Chinese about them, they say things like, "Aren't they convenient?" I'm really not sure what they're comparing them to when they say this--a giant boulder? What they really mean to say is that they would rather swoosh the plastic things away than have to open a door. To each his or her own.
Monday, March 23, 2009
New Apartment
In a little more than a month, we will be moving into a brand new apartment! Since we arrived in Beijing last fall, we have been living in a rather cozy little one bedroom apartment in the college guesthouse. Now, don't get me wrong, it's a pretty nice place (especially the rent), but we're definitely getting anxious to have a full size kitchen, a second bedroom, a dining table that doesn't wobble, and a little more room. Yesterday Seth and I took a look at our new apartment building, which is on the north side of campus. The building is finished, but the apartments still need to be furnished. Needless to say, we are getting very excited!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)