Our Apartment

The dining room. The wall "art" has to go.




The living room, Allyne and more bad wall art. We like the couch, though.




Three of the rooms have huge window seats.




The kids are already using these as a place to nap. We're going to get someone to make seat cushions and pillows to make it even more bed-like.




The "atrium", actually a sun porch with a retractable clothes-line. We've basically given Emma carte blanche to put whatever plants in there she wants. She's pretty excited about it. So is the little old Chinese guy at the nursery.




Another view of the living room. Except for the plants and the Wii, everything you see in these rooms was provided by the school.




Emma at the desk in John's room, which is where all of us currently access the internet. That chair gets a lot of seat-time. We asked the real-estate agent for a wardrobe for John; the rooms don't have closets and John's has no wardrobe, either. She seemed to think the bookcase was sufficient. When I asked her where John should keep his clothes, she told me to ask the school. Sigh. Well, the school will have more leverage than we will on that anyway, so I'll take her advice and get them to talk to our landlord.




Allyne and Emma's room. We don't have enough hangars and we've already cleared two stores of their stock. Getting hangars for five people's entire wardrobe is not an easy feat. You can see laundry hanging in the atrium. Why we are air-drying our clothes will be apparent when I do my post on Chinese appliances.




This is the view from Don's and my bedroom window. Not bad, eh? The apartment complexes here all have gardens in the middle. We also have a little store in the complex. As the Chinese always say, it's "convenient". For some reason they love that word. Must have been in Lesson 23 of The People's Number 7 English.




Me and Don's room. We have our own bathroom, too. The beds are hard, like a box spring. I love it. The kids don't.




View from the kitchen.




Stove. They provided a toaster, bread, orange marmalade and tea. What do they think we are, British? We had to get our own wok and rice steamer.




The first dinner I cooked in the kitchen: Unidentified fish, which I couldn't get the fish guy to clean, even though he had just cleaned someone elses fish (I did it myself..mostly), grean beans and garlic, and rice. No one complained, so I consider it a success.




View from John's room. He has the best view with the canal and the city. We just look at the neighbors from our side.