Learning to Swim, Part 1 of 3: Give a man a home!

So as it turns out I’m not as good at updating this thing as I thought I’d be. Rather than update the blog regularly with short anecdotes and passing observations, I’m forced to scramble every few weeks to put together a super-sized Thanksgiving feast of a post. For those of you with short attention span…or an insatiable appetite for whatever it is I have say…I apologize. Nonetheless, it’s time to pull up a chair, put on your bib, and sound the Feasting Horn! There’s a lot to get you caught up on…

First of all, an explanation for my hiatus: quite simply, moving in, settling in, work, and recovering from the first three. When trying to set up shop on the other side of the world, the list of things to do seems endless. When you can check one thing off, you have to add another item to the list. I often think of learning to swim as a little kid, when your parent stands a short distance away from you, arms outstretched, encouraging you to swim to them. As you paddle and kick your way over, the parent backs up and backs up, and you keep swimming and swimming, flustered that the already challenging task has become even more so. (I often find myself using this analogy…maybe I’ve blocked out some traumatizing swimming lesson from my youth) Anyhow, “learning to swim” in China has been a non-stop mission to find a rhythm and get settled, and a month into it, I’m pleased to say, life is finally starting to show faint signs of settling down.

A major step – finding my apartment – was an interesting mini-adventure. After meeting with the real-estate agent Anson on my first day of work, I was told to expect a call from him the following day to set up a time to go apartment hunting. Tuesday morning came and went without word from Anson, so I took it upon myself after lunch to give him a call. He hadn’t been able to prepare any places to look, so he said one of his colleagues (“colleges,” as many Chinese pronounce it) would call me Wednesday.

Wednesday morning was oddly similar to Tuesday (no phone call), so, beginning to get a little bothered that my already slow acclimation process was approaching “watching paint dry” status, I had Lucy Lu put the whip to them. The uncertainty of why they hadn’t called me when they said they would bothered me greatly. I needed a place soon and the idea that the people expected to assist me in that process weren’t doing their jobs worried me. I only had a few days before EF stopped covering my hotel bill and these factors all made me even more anxious to lock down an apartment.

As it turns out, from what I’ve seen so far, that’s just how things go here. One needs to be patient but also proactive and persistent when trying to get things done. The sooner money’s involved, the better. And while most professional transactions aren’t conducted how they are in the states, if you get a business card from your peer, you’re probably safe from getting scammed.

Finally, that evening, Anson’s “college” Anne gave me a call and we agreed to meet the following morning to look at a few properties near Zhong Shan Park, where my office is located. On the phone, Anne’s timid English was the icing on the incompetence cake as far as I was concerned. Not only had these guys twice failed to follow-up with me when they said they would, but the woman handling my apartment hunt couldn’t even communicate with me? I was not feeling confident about the following morning, at all.

But with the new day came a new attitude and I wasn’t nearly so skeptical about the morning’s outing as I was the night before. I woke up to catch the bus/subway to meet Anne. After a few exchanged text messages I met up with her outside the Zhong Shan Park metro station. She had arranged two properties for us to look at on short notice. One was in my price range; the other was slightly higher than what I wanted. Anne’s English was better in person than on the phone, but I decided to drop the bombshell that I could speak Chinese (kaboosh!) As we made the fifteen minute walk from the station to the first appointment, that seemed to ease things a little bit.

The walk was a straight shot along Chang Ning Lu, a main road in the area. We arrived at a white sign with gold lettering that matched the address of the first stop on our itinerary. The sign hung outside of a nice looking apartment building and we waited there underneath it for the landlord to arrive. After a few minutes, a short woman in her mid-40s with short hair and a gentle, motherly face came to meet us. I missed the Chinese lesson on “Meeting the Landlord” so I just said “ni hao” (hello) and smiled while Anne did most of the talking.

Much to my distress, the woman led us away from the nice apartment building and down a small side road, lined with small shops and speckled with small construction projects. The narrow road served as the main artery for a number of alleyways which each housed a handful of short, concrete apartment buildings. A majority of traditional residential neighborhoods in Shanghai are built in this “long tang,” or alley-way style, which now contrasts quite noticeably with the new high rise apartment complexes shooting up all over town.

After weaving our way through an indistinguishable maze of concrete, construction, drying clothes, and iron gates we arrived at our destination. We walked through a quiet courtyard and into an unremarkable concrete apartment building. The landlord led us up to the second floor, past an abandoned couch and an abandoned bicycle, and welcomed us to our destination. Inside the apartment, the TV was on as the landlord’s husband shuffled around sweeping the floor with a short broom and long-handled dust pan. He, like his wife, also had a friendly face, but his appearance was more aged and his teeth were stained from the common Chinese past-time of smoking.

After seeing the neighborhood, I was very skeptical that this first place was going to be any good. This also concerned me because it was right in the price range I wanted and if this was all I could get for that amount, I would have to make a sacrifice on one end or the other –accommodation or price. Upon entering the apartment however, all of these doubts quickly disappeared. Anne’s exclamation of “Waaaaaah…” (Chinese for “wow”) pretty much summed the place up. Nestled in this old alleyway apartment building was a one bedroom apartment, newly renovated with brand new appliances in every room. A big bed, great natural light, two TV’s, a full bathroom, a sofa bed, a washing machine, a sit-down toilet…and all for a price that couldn’t be beat! The landlords gave us a full tour of the little apartment, and I was certainly impressed. It seemed to have everything I needed.

Excited by this surprising discovery, Anne and I bid farewell to the landlords and went to make a courtesy stop at the other location on the itinerary. It was a located on one of the upper floors of a new hotel right across the street from my office, but it was very small, and too expensive. Anne and I quickly concluded that I should sign a contract for the first place, especially because it was in rather high demand. It was extremely unlikely that I would find another place like that for that price, so close to my office. I told Anne to go ahead and inform the landlords that I wanted the apartment.

Now as much as I could complain about the first few days of dealing with these realtors, I was very impressed by how well they handled things from this point forward. The property was in high demand, but since the landlords liked me, Anne and Anson were able to drop the hammer and lock up a contract signing. Furthermore, they talked the landlords down from their listed rental price and got me the terms of the contract that I wanted. We signed Friday morning and by 1 pm I had the keys in hand. Now I could get the ball rolling!


Vocabulary: 家， jia, "jah," home. Check out the character. The upper radical represents a roof; the lower radical is a pig. Home is where the hog is :)

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