My apartment in Chengdu

They said it would be a quite small place but I want to disagree, the whole apartment is about as big as our living room back in Sparta, maybe a little bit bigger but with some attached furniture; a large cupboard enclosing a small alcove for a bed area and a small desk for work space. I got a lot of furniture included in the rent, luckily because I have nearly spent all my savings on the stuff I didn't get, I got a bed mattress, a TV, a small sofa and a TV table and a washing machine and a refrigerator. It's located on the 20th floor, with a great view, of a totally new building, not even finished yet and I think less than 1/20 of the apartments are read so there are not many people around and this apartment has never been used before, which meant that I had to clean up a lot of construction dust. The construction is a lot less than perfect, but it's nice enough and I guess I'll just have to live with some minor faults that wouldn't really be acceptable in Sweden.

They also said it would be close to central and close to the school, but I didn't really know what to expect, some people's idea of close is sometimes very relative; but it is really close, I think I can walk to the central square of Chengdu in less than 10 minutes, my view is actually over then main central street of Chengdu and I have a large shopping street just 2 minutes walk away from home. Going to the office is a bit further though, maybe 30 minuets walk but my Ivy, my contact and employer, suggest that I should buy a bike, the office is not really the issue actually, I will work in several different kindergartens and to get to most of them I will probably need a bike.

I have bought a lot of minor attires, first what I needed to sleep and clean and today I was at IKEA and bought quite a lot of kitchen stuff, not yet my portable cooking platform though but that will come soon enough. I'm planning to buy a cupboard to put on top of the fridge too so I can keep my plates and bowls and other kitchen stuff somewhere, and then I'll use the glass shelves next to the sofa for liquor and wine. I'm sometimes feeling that I'm overdoing it, but if I'm to stay here for 5 months or even a year I will want it nice and comfortable.

Chengdu

I had to leave Beijing quite early in the morning because I had to, or more wanted to, leave when Mei went to work in the morning. To my great luck I got put on an earlier flight and hardly had to wait at all in the airport and arrived in Chengdu nearly an hour ahead of schedule. I was worried that this would mean that Ivy, my contact here, wouldn’t be there on time but she was and even found me without any hustle, she complained a bit that I had taken long to get my luggage but that’s not really my fault, it just takes long to get the luggage, my bag was actually one of the first to arrive on the band actually, she commented that I looked fatter than on the pictures she had seen though, small surprise, I think the picture I sent with the application was from last year’s travel.

We went straight to what is now my apartment and met with the net-owner (is that really what a landlord should be called?) and it took about half the day to go through the contract and everything that had to do with it, all in all I’m quite satisfied with the place, despite the lack of a kitchen but I plan to buy some portable stuff for that, I will make a post dedicated to the apartment too. Ivy had gotten too tired to take care of me and switched with a girl that apparently is my assistant in class for the next 2-3 months; I think her name is Betty. Betty took me to a super market much like Ica Maxi in Sweden for me to buy the most necessary things that I would need right away, which was a lot, probably more than she had thought, and I took the opportunity to buy some cleaning stuff too, the apartment is brand new but it wasn’t that clean, construction dust just about everywhere.

When Betty left I met up with Lily instead, my online friend that got me in contact with Ivy and the job in the first place. Lily as been a bit sick lately so she wasn’t too energetic but we went out for a dinner at a Sichuan hotpot place; a really interesting way were you have a pot that is divided in two halves, one with spicy soup and one with not so spicy, and dipping the food in oil with some garlic and stuffs mixed into it before eating. It was really quite good, despite the fact that I found a fish in the not spicy soup, I had actually tasted it when I drank the soup by itself but hadn’t bothered to care, and once I found the fish it was too late already.

Today I’ve been alone all day, I had planned to go to IKEA with Lily but she was feeling worse and I think she went to the hospital for a check-up, we will go there tomorrow instead. So I spent most of the day reading and I cleaned the apartment and went once again to the supermarket to buy some more stuff in the afternoon, plus had a lonely dinner at KFC where some kids seemed quite amazed to see me.

My biggest problem here these days has been cash: of course I haven’t gotten a single salary yet; that is something I get after working, not before, of course. But still I needed to pay 3 months of rent plus a deposit of one month’s rent; that’s 4210 Yuan for that, to that I had to buy quite a lot of stuff, spent around 700 yesterday and around 100 more today and to get internet, which will take 5 days from now anyway, I had better pay for 6 months, it would cost about one and a half month more if I paid per month, and that cost another 628 Yuan, and I still have my phone bill in Sweden that is was too much, next month will be nearly just as bad I fear and now I have to get a Chengdu phone-card too, that one is just around 100 Yuan though. It’s just luck that I just got my salary from Sony-Ericsson and didn’t pay mom back all the money that I’ve borrowed right away.

Added 2007-08-30
Now an added output of over 900Yuan was spent at IKEA and the company I work for wanted a deposit of 1000Yuan but we agreed that it would be enough if we just deducted that from the first salary. I’m planning to buy a portable stove for about 200Yuan and a rice cooker for about 100Yuan, in my plan for a kitchen there is also a oven/microwave-oven but those costs at least 600Yuan, so we will have to see about that.

Birthday dinner with Mei

After I left Annie and Eva I headed off to meet Mei for our annual birthday dinner at Pizza hut (I pretty much doubt that we will keep this tradition next year, but who knows). Arriving at Gongzhufen there was some confusion, I had sent a message to Mei that I was on the way there and she has taken it as that I was already there and asked me to get a table-queue-ticket and when I called her to say I was there and wondered where to go she was trying to figure out why I hadn’t gotten the ticket yet. Somehow I managed to find my way to pizza hut but she arrived before me and probably thought that I was really stupid to take 30-45 minutes to walk from the subway station to pizza hut.

She had already gotten a ticket and ordered a cake too so there was nothing to do but to wait, and wait we did. I think we waited for about one and a half hour before we got our table, and when there was about 10 minutes left Mei was about to give up totally. Dinner at Pizza hut is as always way too much, and for some reason we always do this when my stomach is at its least; last year it was the day after I had recovered from my illness and was hardy fit for anything and this year it was the hangover that got the best of me, and on top of it all we started with the cake, a cake that was 3 parts cream, 2 parts cake material (one those egg, flour and sugar bottoms) and one part fruits in 3 layers. I did try my best at least, even went to the toilet and stayed there for so long that Mei got worried that something had happened and call me, and during that time some poor kid needed to throw up but since there was only one toilet he had to do it in the pissing-booth, very poor kid.

Two pretty girls from Harbin

I met up with Gunglu's friend Annie this Sunday morning/afternoon. She is a small, pretty and talkative girl that was really easy to hang out and talk to, and she brought a friend too, another girl from Harbin that wasn't at all as talkative but just as pretty, and best of all, she call herself Eva, which makes me feel really comfortable. We met at Tiananmen east subway station, which was really perfect for me because I needed to buy something for Mei for our birthday party in the evening and I know of a small little soft-toy store close to there, the place where I bought just about all the stuff I brought home last year.

It was way after breakfast and after my long night of partying the night before I was nearly starving but not in the mood to eat anything, at least not anything that I didn't know exactly what it was. We went over to the other shopping street in central Beijing (e.g. not Xidan where I had met Nini the evening before), Wangfujing and found a McDonalds there. I think we spent more than an hour there, just relaxing and talking and avoiding the short rains and trying to decide what to really do, talk could almost have been enough really.

Finally we decided to go do some touristing at least, they are both nearly as strange to Beijing as me, if not even more when it comes to sightseeing and after discarding a few parks that were just too small and not nearly touristy enough we decided on going to Jingshan park, the park/mountain that is just north of and overlooking the forbidden city, and after a while we even managed to decide, rather I decided how to go there, they both wanted to take a bus or taxi but it was not really that far so we walked instead.

Walking was really nice, and gave us a lot more time to talk about everything and nothing, as always, and when we finally reached the park we started climbing the steepest hill immediately, it wasn't really that steep but my calves doesn't like climbing at all, and despite the coolness of rainy weather I got really sweaty really fast, but at least it wasn't very high. The view was a bit of a disappointment actually, the view was half covered by some tall trees and the closest building was covered in a big green construction shelter, much like the first and biggest one was last year when Joyce and I was in the forbidden city itself. The view to the other directions were better though, especially the one to the northwest where you could see BeiHai (The Northern sea) clearly, the north view was quite nice too, a long street ending at Zhong Lou (The Bell Tower), east was nothing at all, wasn't even worth a picture.

Mei's apartment in Beijing

Mei's place is actually quite interesting, it's a quite small building in west Beijing, I think just outside the third circle (they measure distances in Beijing, and I think in most of China in big circle roads on regular distances from the city center) and quite close to Beijing west railway station. The building is an old 5 story building, and the whole neighbourhood is really old and dirty, I think it's quite poor too; on the first night when I just got there I saw some old man sleeping in the entrance of a half wrecked building and many of the buildings where people lives there are little more than shelters. It still has a cozy feeling to it in some way. The most annoying part was the closeness to the railway track, and not only one but the whole train stalls for the train station about 20 or so track of which the closest one is less than 20m away.

Clubbing in Beijing

Finding Houhai was not as easy as I had hoped, I figured that I got off at the closest metro station and thought that I could walk from there, after about 20 minutes of walking through a street sided with ruins and reconstruction work I gave up, my friend (actually friends friend), Candy, got to talk to the taxi driver with my phone and after some argument, when Chinese people talk it always sounds like argument, he understood where to go and drove me there, and it was quite far. Once there I contacted Candy again but neither of us was really certain that I was at the right place, we did manage to find each other, or she found me, and we went off to find a bar. I didn’t really understand why it needed so much finding, there were tons of bars all around us, but Candy insisted that we should find a special one. I guess it was not so much finding the place as just walking there, it was a bit to walk to get there but I might have been worth it, we didn’t test any other place so I can’t be sure.

The place was small and had like nearly all the other places a singer, and he was actually pretty good. Candy seemed to fall half in sleep or in trance everything he was singing some sad love song, I figured that she must have some kind of love problem, which she later admitted too, so I didn’t disturb her. We had a few beers, she one and me two, at that place and they went on to another place that was more like a tiny club than a bar, or something in between, I think they call it dancing bar or something like that. It was not too crowded but since it had started raining everybody had gone inside and there were some cute girls around dancing, they had a hired dancer too and she was actually quite hot. And Candy is the kind of girl with too much energy that would dance alone without music, so I really didn’t have much choice unless I wanted to sit alone somewhere in the noise, it was too much noise to start random conversation and I was not in much mood for that anyway.

After that we took a taxi to somewhere a little bit more central where we met up with her friends for KTV, karaoke. To say friends might be an exaggeration, but I guess they are in a way, they are online friends forming a group in a messenger like network called QQ that is very common here in China, they only meet once in a while to go out clubbing, Candy said she only really knows one of them and this is only the third time they met. They were all pretty cool though, and it is a really good idea that people of the same mind go out together, all of them were out for drinking and partying, not a single one of them were reluctant to drink more than a sip like most other Chinese, especially girls, that I’ve met. They taught me a pretty cool dice drinking game that seems to be common here, and I tried to sing once too, that was quite a disaster though. We didn’t have much time at the KTV place, we arrived just when they were leaving, had we arrived earlier we would have had to pay our part for the room too, which might actually have been worth it, it was pretty fun.

A very long drive to somewhere where a girl that had broken her shoe and a very long drive from there to the club, the club was pretty cool too and it seems there was no entrance fee. I think it doesn’t work that way here actually, it seems there was no dance floor either actually, I think that there are just a lot of big tables, and every group will buy a table and drinks for the night that that, then everybody is just hanging around their own table. I’m not really certain of this, it looked like there was a dance floor when we arrived, but at around 5am when most people had left is seemed to have tables everywhere where people had been dancing too. And that’s what we had too, a big table for our group, a small wagon with Chiva’s Regal and Icetea, that seems to be the only thing they drink, it’s quite good though so I don’t mind. Clubbing music in China is what you expect from one of the smaller dance floors in any larger club in Sweden, or in a techno club, but the only techno club I’ve ever been to is Amnesia, Sydskånska nationen once in a while, It’s not really the kind of music I would like, it’s just too unchanging, but in general I like places where people are having fun, so this works as good as anything.

We stayed at the club until around 5am, with some fall outs along the way I guess, most of the guys stayed all the time and there were 4 girls left including Candy, she is one energetic girl, when we left. Most of us when for some food, breakfast of drunken food or whatever it can be called, at a noodle place, it’s not what I eat when I’ve been drinking so I didn’t have much, but having some hot soup, we all had noodle soup, was quite refreshing. After that Candy and I got dropped off at the closest metro station, and after about 20 minutes waiting we caught the first train back to where ever, Candy got off after only one stop so after that I was alone, trying my best to stay awake until my station.

I did manage to stay awake but once at the station I couldn’t find a single taxi to take me back to Mei’s place. After some time a guy in a small car stopped and offered me a ride though, I assumed it was a illegal taxi service and I paid him twice what a normal taxi would cost, I’m just too nice sometimes, especially when I’m drunk. Once home the next problem came up, the door was locked and I don’t have any key, Mei didn’t answer her mobile, she had left it in another room when she went to sleep, which is really bad since she had agreed to help me if I had any problems with taxi or anything on the way home, and no one seemed to hear me banging on the door. After about 20 minutes Mei’s boyfriend had woken up, partly by the banging and partly by the phone I guess, and opened for me.

Nini & the Sichuan resturant

On Saturday afternoon I met up with Nini, we just walked around in Xidan, one of the bigger shopping areas in Central Beijing, and looked at people. A crazy person on the 3rd floor of one shopping mall scared the shit out of everyone around and despite the think crowd no one dared to go within 3-4 meters of him, and when someone did get close is started screaming and touching his arm as if trying to brush something off. Outside a mall on a walkway that actually didn’t lead to anything but was nice to walk at because it was soft we saw a girl crying on the shoulder of someone, Nini and I, or rather I, made up a story of how they guy and just broken up with the girl and was now trying to comfort her for it, but the guy turned out to be a girl too, really manly looking though probably because of her clothing style, so we changed the story to either a lesbian couple or that she had lost something, possibly her boyfriend, and needed comforting by her friend, they stayed out there for a long time at anyway.


I won the now always occurring bet so Nini had to buy us ice cream at KFC and with the ice cream we walked around some more, found a little park where someone had just bought a helicopter like the one dad has but about 20 times larger, it only costs like 200yuen so I think I will buy one for myself later, they are pretty cool. For dinner we had, of course, Sichuan food, we didn’t go to the same place as last year though but found a place that I think was much nicer, I think it is a pretty newly built building and they had a whole floor for the restaurant. We had some vegetables and a tofu dish were you have a big pot of tofu and some small bowls of other stuff that you mix together in your own small bowl, it was really nice, despite the total lack of meat. After dinner Nini was off to the Beijing west railway station to see someone off and I was going to Houhai to meet a friend for a drink or two, we were going in the same direction though but I was off a few stations before her.