All at Once

September 28, 2008

19th September 2008

Been a lot of exciting changes in the past week, I’ve made some new friends and moved house. Let’s go.

Saturday

As I was saying last time, I was planning on calling around for accomodation on Saturday. I had to return to the internet cafe first to check the dates-of-posting for the 5 apartments. Unfortunately this reduced my list of five down to two as three of the postings were made at least half a year ago, some dating back to Christmas last year, with the remaining two being filed in the last month.

With all of this out the way I made my calls. The first place, a 10 minutes walk to Shanghai Stadium, was already taken, would have been sweet but no problem. I tried the second one, a two storey house, the top storey being my own, located two minutes from the Gong Kang road subway station and sharing with a quiet Chinese guy. This one was a success, the man at the other end of the phone was very helpful and spoke solid english. I quizzed him a little and then arranged to meet him the following day at the subway station two minutes from the house.

This was all reassuring and put me in a suitably upbeat mood. I can’t remember what I did for the rest of the afternoon, but I do remember something that I previously forgot to mention.

A few days earlier, I met an exchange student – Male, 28, Cambodia – who was also going to be living in the Old Guest House. I met him in Mrs Hua’s office and told him to pay me a visit sometime. So Thursday night, on returning home, the receptionist at the Old Guest House (that’s one of the two older laddies who live in their pyjamas, watching TV all day) told me that this guy couldn’t find me and would say hello later.

Just like the lady had said, he came knocking at about 8:00pm that night, so I invited him in and we traded stories for an hour or so. He is over here on a Shanghai Government scholarship - a higher class than the one the University threw at me – studying for his doctorate or Phd…or something like that. He does not know Chinese and English is his second language. It’s pretty difficult to understand what he has to say in either language.

On one of the nights we went out and had pizza together. He explained more about the resort like accomodation of his friend’s over at TongJi University and how their life is very comfortable. The pizzas we ordered had heaps of cheese, some meat and a beef like base, t’was actually quite nice although we should have ordered the size up. We also drank some sort of honey tea - it’s packaged and sold like soft drinks over here and is a cold drink.

Sunday

Sunday morning, the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival, I took the subway for about an hour to meet this guy and inspect the house. To my surprise the subway doesn’t always remain underground, in some areas it accends up onto it’s own level above the rest of the other highways supported by pillars - think Wipeout-styled roads that twist, dip and turn.

I reached the train station, got off and gave this guy a call. After some quibbling he said that the room had already been taken and then followed up with a flurry of ’sorry’s. Pissed off that he hadn’t told me earlier and also a the typicall-ness of Chinese people (they’re all a bit like this, I think) I caught the subway home. That’s two hrs gone, not so cool.

I wasn’t really sure where to turn next, I had already tried some ‘good’ agents and checked out all of the websites recommended to me by Marcus and my other classmates, I’d tried the local student paper as well. It’d been raining outside and rained on me during my trip to nowhere so I think I played quite a bit of Thrilby: The Art of Theft for the rest of the afternoon. This title is by Yahtzee Crosshaw who narrates the often excellent Zero Punctuation. The game is equally fantastic and fully fleshed out, could definetly hold it’s own against some of the classic Commodore adventure titles.

That night, with all my options exhausted, I opted to give my friend Xi over in Anhui a call and see if he could help me. We talked for a while, he shared some details about his upcoming purposal to his girlfriend and asked for some advice. As for the accomodation, he said that he’d get in touch with his friends in Shanghai and see if they could help me. He said that he’d call them right after we’d finished talking, very gracious of him.

I got a call back about 20 minutes later from Xi explaining that one of his friends was out of Shanghai at the moment but another one – Hanxue, young girl who had added me to QQ ( the Chinese online chat program) about a month ago – would be glad to help, he told me to call her at about 1pm tommorow. Oh yeah, because of the Mid-Autumn festival it was a long weekend with the Monday off. Yay!

Monday

Not much else happened up until then, the weather hadn’t been too good outside, so I primarily stuck to my homework and at 1pm on the dot I received a text message from Hanxue. She wanted to know if we could meet up at 3:00pm that day. I gave her a call to organise everything, she wanted to meet me at the university but I said it was too far and explained what she’d have to do to get there. After some txting and calling back we eventually rested on meeting at the People’s Square.

I arrived a little early at the People’s Square and was simply amazed at the place. It is so upper-class, so sophisticated, so not like back home. The buildings in the area were all so interesting, elaborate and unconventionally design. Big screen TVs plaque some of the buildings too and display advertisements of up-market products.

I walked around a garden area (totally spotless of litter), the lawns were so incredibly lush and trimmed down to the blade. In the centre and infront of the Shanghai museum was a fountain, the centre-piece of the area. This was really magical. Parents were playing with their children, coming out drenched in water and with smiles on their faces. People were taking photos of each other with the water shooting up around them while others were flying kites. It was like a small, public resort in the middle of the city. Lovely.

I looped back around and after a few more minutes of waiting, Hanxue and a male friend came up to me and asked if I was Daniel - Hanxue is a short, cute Chinese girl, her personality is very natural, she is very kind and has a lovely character. I said yes and together they looked around for a place to go and talk. On the way they introduced themselves and the relationship that they have with Xi Wei. The male friend is also another one of Xi’s friends - Ou Yan, he looks a little dopey but is an interesting character and is kind and considerate like the others - and a friend to the rest of the party. They all studied english together in Anhui.

We went across the road and to a KFC which was packed, so out the front they whipped out a map and I explained where I was and where I was looking to move to. I’m not sure why they wanted to go to KFC, especially at 3:30pm in in the afternoon, clues indicate that they really like junkfood.

I get the impression that they wanted me to live near them since we then caught the subway down to where they live to find accomodation down there. They live near a stop on the line one, I guess about 25 minutes from my Uni. On the way I spoke some english to them and they seemed to have a hard time understanding what I was saying. Kinda surprised since Xi said that their english was better than his (and he seemed to understand me very well).

At the subway station we waited out the front for a while since it was raining heavily and there was thunder and lightning. There were people selling umbrellas out the front as well, very clever.

After 10 minutes of standing, I suggested that we just move since the weather didn’t look like it was going to get any better. So we did, I got a little wet along the way but it was fine. We travelled through an underpass and onto another street which was lined with a few real estate companies among small fashion stores. We went into about three of them and gave up after we couldn’t find a house that offered anything less than a half year package.

From there we did a little more walking down to Hanxue’s apartment. The estate was full of buildings smothered in grim and disgust, the sort of environment that is starting to become very familiar to me. We walked up a flight stairs to her room and she whipped out her laptop to look online for me. My problem was that I couldn’t find a 4 month deal, rental was only a year, six months or three months.

We spent maybe half an hour looking online and eventually found a suitable place, Hanxue called and we could inspect right away. In this time, the friend out of Shanghai had arrived, his name is Sam, he can also speak English and insists on speaking it to me as much as possible. He is also the joker out of the group. The other friend Ou Yan and Sam lit up a smoke and puffed away until we left. The Chinese seem to do this a bit, smoke with no regards to the people around them, Hanxue and myself don’t smoke.

Oh yeah, also while we where there Hanxue set up a QQ conversation with Xi using the webcam on her laptop (video of me and them, to him, one way). Very cool.

We headed off together and then caught a bus, 5 minutes to the destination. By this time it was already quite dark. We walked into another estate of about 60 buildings, all covered in the usual. There were also vendors selling fruit and other things. At the main gate there are people selling copied DVDs, although the inlet has the casing of a Blu-ray movie. Not sure which one they are.

We had to make a few turns to get to the building in which the unit was situated and eventually found ourselves in the right direction. So we knocked and were greeted in, the other two guys remained at the door and eventually headed off – I later discovered that they’d booked their own apatment in the same estate.

Basically the deal works like this. I pay 1000 yuan a month in rent (divide all of these by about 5.5 or 6 to get an approximate AUD or even USD) each month and then another 100 yuan ($20) in utilities, there is also a small charge dependent on how much I use the aircon due to the way it is set up -seperate from the other units…or something like that. This price is roughly half of what I was paying to stay in the Old Guest House over in Yangpu, yet there are no roaches here, I spotted 3 in the Old Guest House.

I am on the second floor of the building and live with the landlord’s son. The landlord lives below me. She is very outgoing and a little in-your-face at times. She speaks very loud, very local sounding Chinese and is constantly talking, sharing stories or cracking jokes. Despite her out-going nature she is very courteous towards guests and always ensures that they are comfortable. Her son is perhaps the opposite, he is quiet and introvert, he doesn’t say much and I find what he does say tends to be a little tough to understand. He has a PS2 in his room and spends a lot of his time playing games or on the internet. In fact that is all he ever seems to do.

The apartment is very comfortable and clean. My room and the son’s room are at opposite ends, divided by the kitchen and bathroom. All of the appliances are new and in good condition, the kitchen is quite clean as well. The tiles in the bathroom don’t feel like tiles and in fact look just like the floor boards, gives the bathroom a very cosy feel. Clothes are hung outside on the window by the son’s room.

My room has plenty of cupboards to store stuff in and my bed is a size up from what I have in Australia and is very comfortable. My cupboards right angle the bed. There is a TV (LCD, 20.1”, says it’s 1080p), aircon, fan and desk light in my room.

The landlord was keen to point out that everything in the house is well kept and she used plenty of visual examples such as rubbing her shirt against the furniture to get the point across. She also mentioned that she can help me wash my clothes, cook meals and sign me up for the internet.

This deal seemed pretty sweet, both from my point of view and Huaxue’s, so I gave her 300 yuan in rent so that she’d hold the room for me for 5 days. We spent a lot of time talking before that, especially Huaxue and the landlord. I think that the landlord was pleased that I could understand Chinese. We had to go out and get some money as well, since I orignally didn’t have the 300 yuan on me.

From there, after much conversation had pursued, Hanxue and I left. At the main gate, I asked her what was happening next, she asked if I wanted to have tea with her and the others, by that time it was already about 8:00pm and the trip home was at leats an hour so I declined. We then caught a bus to the closest subway station and she accompanied me in, from there we split. I’d said to her many times that I didn’t know how to thank her for all her help. She said it was nothing and told me to tell her when I arrived home safely.

I caught the subway and on the way tried to phone home. On the subway this big Chinese guy got on and began making a speech to the people on the train. Something about fighting corruption for an harmonious society. Once he finished, he turned to me and repeated the speech in english. Crazy I know. Much as I’d figured, he was talking about fighting corruption in government and society. He also mentioned that if I put his name in google - that’s fat teacher in Chinese, in english try the key words; fat teacher, line one subway, china - that I could find out more information on how to join his crusade. Once I get wireless I am going to give it a go.

So I got home safely, both Hanxue and Xi had txt’d me to ask if I had got home okay. I had made some calls to the family in this time so I hadn’t noticed the messages. I replied to both of them. I had two cups and a pack of Pringles for tea, man I am killing my body over here. Phew what a day, finally I had made some progress and some friends too, very pleasing.

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