Apartment Hunting in Beijing

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I was apartment hunting from when I arrived. My work colleague recommended a young woman agent, Ivy, and it was great to have her. I couldn’t imagine doing the search on my own, but I guess there are ads in English-language newspapers for Westerners. I’ve been reading “Beijing for Beginners”, a book by Gary Finnegan, an Irish journalist who taught English here for a year, just before the Olympics. It’s very good. He wrote about not wanting to live in an international residential area or a “gated community” and that made sense to me. But I discovered that it is very difficult to find accommodation in blocks for Chinese. Ten years or more ago the Chinese authorities used to insist that Westerners live in specially designated blocks but that doesn’t apply any more. When I say “residential area” I don’t mean a neighbourhood, but rather an estate/complex of from four to 20-something apartment blocks, each with 15 – 25 floors.
The agent keeps telling me that “for security reasons” I would be much better off in a residential area with a security guard and management that speak English, in case problems arise. I'm not convinced. I’m sure the security officers keep out unsavoury characters, but I would be very surprised if such fellows even tried to enter an apartment complex. I figure that there are security officers at nearly every housing complex just to give jobs to all these young men. (I’ve never seen a woman security officer.)The huge numbers of unskilled, unemployed young men could become a big problem for the government. I notice that their armbands say that they are “volunteers” but I believe they get paid some sort of minimal wage. What amuses me is to see them marching in formation at change-of-shift time in their dark green “fatigues” with ref “Security Volunteer” armbands and white gloves!
From what I’ve seen these housing areas are very mixed with Chinese grandmothers minding their toddler grandchildren while au pairs watch Western children at the playground. I asked the agent to show me some apartments in a residential area where most of residents were Chinese, so she showed me four or five. After having viewed some mixed complexed, the difference was surprising with cigarette smoke in the hallways and apartments, dogs, piles of bicycles, shoes and sports equipment outside private apartment doors, grotty cement indoor sports facilities. A former tenant told me that one reason why she moved from an all-Chinese complex was because she couldn’t stand the way the residents “horked” and spat in the swimming pool. That finished me alright.
Really I didn’t have a lot of choice because if you work in an area of international businesses and offices, that’s where the apartments are too. We aren’t in central Beijing, but close to the Third Ring Road. (You live in Beijing if you are inside the Fifth Ring Road.) I think someone said that Beijing doesn’t have one downtown area but is like a series of towns, each with a centre. Our local shopping area is Sanitun. One of my Irish colleagues decided to take a fabulous apartment a few miles from the office that overlooks a park. For me, the hassle of having to take a taxi to and from work every day, and back into town for evening functions, would outweigh that advantage.
Finally I made a decision and I’ve moved into my apartment. It was actually the first one I looked at, on the 18th Floor in a complex of about 20 towers. On first viewing I dismissed it as unsuitable because of the highly polished floors which I consider to be treacherous. No thanks. However, after looking at about 20 other apartments in various complexes, I realised that they all have bare, shining floors. I’ll just have to learn to live with them.
When I was deciding whether to take this apartment I had a very experienced colleague have a look at it. The former tenants had two small boys and my friend suggested that I ask the landlady to paint the walls throughout before I move it, so I did. It is difficult in these situations when you are in a different culture. One wants to be sensitive, without expecting Western standards yet trying not to be naive and taken advantage of. It could have been that when I asked for it to be painted I’d be told that these walls are pristine by Beijing standards and paint costs a fortune so every 10 years is normal. That would be very embarrassing. At the same time, a landlady won’t do what she doesn’t have to. That’s universal.
When I moved in here, which was easy because I only have my two suitcases full of belongings, a few faults came to light. The management company’s maintenance men came at the appointed hour and set to work fixing what they could. One bathroom sink plunger wouldn’t stay down and the workman used chopsticks to pull what looked like a dead black rat from the drain. Yuk!! I looked away while he plopped it into the toilet, but I guess it was a mass of hair. The previous tenants had a maid who was here whenever we visited, but I’d say from the condition of the apartment she wasn’t much good. It did mean that I got a new washing machine, though. The instructions were all in Chinese characteristics, so that was another challenge which I finally dealt with. I have to run the bathroom taps for a few minutes before getting hot water, but I soon got used to that.
Another unique aspect of apartment-living in Beijing (and perhaps in all urban centres in China) is that the Chinese authorities decide when you can have central heating. Apparently every year they turn off the gas supply to furnaces on the 15th March and turn it back on on the 15th November. They have been known to turn it on earlier if the weather is unusually cold. Just my luck, I moved in here on the 18th March, just after the heating had been turned off. I was very cold in the evenings for the first 2 weeks, when the outdoor temperature was dropping to 2C at night, but I couldn’t buy a heater even in large electrical shops. The salesmen said, “What do you want a heater for? It’s roasting out!” Luckily it soon warmed up
In ways, Beijing is so much more advanced than the West. For example, I have no keys to this apartment. I devised a 4-digit code when I arrived and I just slide up the lock cover, tap in the code and the door opens –zzzzippp. When I come in and close the door there’s another zzzziiipp as it locks, then I can slide across a safety lock button. I was given a cursory explanation as the landlady was leaving and for the next few days, luckily in the middle of the day, I set off the alarm when I opened the door to go out. I soon learned to push an electronic button first, then wait outside until a neon light flashes to indicate that it has locked after me. There is a swipe card for the entrance door to this tower, but it has been easier to memorise the code. I’ve already lost two of the swipe cards.
My apartment is on the 18nd Floor but this isn’t really that high up. The Chinese are very superstitious and the character for “4” is also the character for “death”. So nobody wants a licence plate with lots of “4’s” and there are no 4th, 13th or 14th Floors. When I took UN Safety & Security course in Afghanistan and Sudan, they advised that one never take a hotel room higher than the 5th or 6th floors. That’s because that is as high as fire engine ladders can reach. (Not many people know that!) I’ve decided to take my chances. Actually, while on that subject, I have notice that in some of the very new office and apartment complexes the tall buildings are joined by skywalks near the top floors. I’m sure this is to assist emergency evacuation – or maybe if the elevator breaks down. All of the electricity died in the complex one Sunday morning in springtime. Luckily I had no definite plans to go anywhere so I decided to wait it out. The electricity returned in the late afternoon. Whew.
The grounds here are really nice and interesting and I took photos of the flowering trees as they sprang to life. There is a guard at the gate 24/7 and I have a swipe card for that too. Usually the guard is glad of the exercise and puts down the emergency phone and walks over to open the small pedestrian gate. Maybe it’s a respect thing for the grey-haired woman, which is handy. He then hustles back to his podium to clutch the phone – just in case, you never know. I then walk to my tower past the sports facility which includes a fitness gym, a pool, table tennis courts and activity rooms for dance and Taichi classes.
Of course I wouldn’t be in such a nice apartment if my employer weren’t paying some of the rent. All things are relative and I think this apartment is very big. It’s 140 sq.m. and when I consider that my cottage in Ireland is 45 sq.m., it’s hard to believe the difference and this seems only a little bigger. I love the second bedroom with a lovely view east over the lights of Beijing. There’s also a small office on the same side with that view. I’m not an architect but I think the design of these apartments is incredible because you don’t share many walls with your neighbours. I think maybe the sittingroom end walls adjoin and one end of the kitchen, but not the sittingroom, bedrooms or office, all of which have windows. So I have many views to the west and east. Another big “plus” is the sunroom off the main bedroom where I can dry clothes in summer and read in the cool sunshine in the spring and autumn.

There’s a good-sized kitchen with a gas hob, electric stove and microwave oven. Beijing’s water is not drinkable so the landlady provided a new water cooler/heater for bottled water, which I just use at room temperature. Mr. Dong Dong in the complex’s leisure centre (he gave me his card!) brings a 5L. bottle on request for €1.90.
It has two bedrooms and two bathrooms, one with bath/shower and the other with walk-in shower. I knew from travelling that these often leak out onto the floor and this is no exception. There is a drain on the other side of the bathroom but this means standing in a puddle at the wash handbasin. Annoying. So I have to use both bathrooms daily! The luxury of it all.
The apartment is furnished, with plenty of built-to-fit cupboards. The huge one in the second bedroom was built such that, when installed, it took up half the room and concealed the light switch and air conditioning... box (what do you call that thing on the wall?). The landlady saw no problem with this lack of access. The kids had obviously pushed their grubby hands in the little space to turn on the light. Yuk! Yet it took some persuasion to get the landlady to get men to come and dismantle the wardrobe and move it to the office. Whew. Then I just had to paint the wall which the painters left untouched, thinking it wouldn’t be seen. Luckily the painters left the remains of a tin of paint behind when they were finished. The paint on the bathroom cupboards was worn and peeling in many places to I’ve bought the gloss paint and as soon as the temperature cools down I will sand a paint the cupboard doors. I must say that project was delayed for a long time when I couldn’t explain to any shopkeeper what sandpaper was. I’d take out my emery board for my nails and pretend to sand with it, then take up a paint brush and pretend to paint. I guess I’d suck at charades.
Normal beds in China are rock hard, but Beijingers know that Westerners don’t like them. The master bedroom here has a 2m/6’6”wide king-sized bed and the mattress was a rock. The landlady let me go to IKEA and buy a soft mattress and a 2”-thick “mattress topper” which all beds here have. Maybe it is something like memory foam. She also let me pick out another double bed for myself and I discovered that the smallest at IKEA was 1.5m/5ft wide. What’s with such big beds when Chinese people are of a much smaller stature? That meant another trip to Carrefour to get king and queen-sized bedding and linen.
I pay for my utilities but, with all the apartments in China, sending and paying paper bills would be a lot of hassle. Beijing has a great solution. Upon arrival you are given a card for the electricity and one for the gas. When you see that your meter reading is getting low, you take this card to the bank where you pay for credit, something like a mobile phone credit but you keep the same utility card all the time. When you come home you open the door to the utility meter closet on your floor’s hallway, identify your apartment’s meter and put your card in the slot. Presto - units are added to your meter reading! I think it’s a brilliant system. Normally the wait at the bank is an hour or two, so most people get their maid to do it (maids are another topic for another time) but my Chinese colleague told me of a rural bank near the office which has few customers so we had no wait.
I have a landline phone but I never use it. Maybe it would be good in an emergency. The only thing I use it for is WiFi. It costs about 300RMB/€30 and I have to buy 100RMB scratch cards at a newspaper kiosk and tap in the code to get WiFi credit. It’s a bit of a nuisance if you forget it is due and you lose your WiFi until you can buy some scratch cards. Do you see what I mean when I say there are no utility bills?
But my favourite is my water bill that is put into my letter box in the entrance hall every moth by the management company. There is a charge for both normal water use and the use of recycles water. I have to go to the office during the day to pay the bill. So far it has been a consistent 40cents/month!
The landlady provided a brand new 40” thin screen TV, which is a bit much for my tastes. I pay for satellite TV. Groan, another hassle. After trying to sort it out for some time, it transpired that the Chinese government had cut off all satellite reception from the New Year celebration in February. Apparently this happens every year for about a week. The sustained cut-off last spring days was unusual and could have been related to the unrest in the Middle East. I did have Chinese English-language TV news for a while and they were reporting events in Libya, so it’s a bit puzzling.
Ivy, the young woman agent who did the apartment search with me has been terrific since I moved in and has sorted out all kinds of hassles. She told me that the satellite TV that I paid for was, like almost all of Chinese satellite TV, pirated. The real thing would cost ten times as much. So reception resumed at the Government’s whim. The reception isn’t consistent and the action often freezes, maybe for 3 minutes and maybe for the rest of the evening. But I can always switch over to Chinese TV in English for some nice, sterile programming. But Chinese TV is another topic for another time.
The next thing was to get the dvd player fixed. I thought it was a bit much for the estate management technician to actually come to the apartment for such a small thing but that’s the system. He was squatting outside my apartment door when I returned at lunchtime and stayed an hour. He supplied a part that he said would fix the dvd player and his bill was €15. My next stop was the dvd shop where one can get all the very latest movies in lovely, professional packaging, for 80cents each – Black Swan, The King’s Speech, Invictus, The Fighter, Social Network, you name it. But I couldn’t find the Bruce Willis one I wanted, Red. Apparently these shops get raided from time-to-time, probably just a chance to collect illicit bribes, and then customers have to go down the back lane to the “temporary accommodation” for a few weeks until the coast is clear again. If you buy from traders in the street they may be poor quality but I’m told that most dvds from this fancy shop are of good quality. They seemed fine to me.
By the time I went on holidays mid-May the weather was very nice so I didn’t need a heater any longer, just a fan in the evenings in the bedroom. When I came back from holidays mid-June the daily temperatures were in the 30Cand the apartment was like an oven. No one told me that I had to make an appointment for the technician from the management company to switch over each unit of my heating system to A/C. Those two days of unbearable heat were unforgettable. This situation doesn’t arise in every apartment complex. In some they put a note under the apartment doors to remind tenants to do the changeover. I believe I have to do it again in October. I’ll soon be looking out for a fan heater in case it gets cool before the Government decides to turn on the central heating. If I don’t get one soon I could be battling crowds who want the same thing.
I must say that the apartment is incredibly quiet. I only have two neighbours on this floor. One is an Iranian couple with a 7-yr-old daughter. I met the wife who is a doctor and acupuncturist. The other family is Chinese with a daughter of 6. I heard her practicing the piano on one of my visits here but the maid said that you can’t hear it when the apartment door is closed. That’s true. But I also have someone of similar age living beneath me who also has a piano which is practiced daily. I was warned that “The Beijingers love their pianos!” Apparently it can be the bane of one’s life in an apartment. Friends had a neighbour who was a musician from a night club who played the piano a lot. My Irish colleague has a neighbour who plays for hours, often at 3:00 and 4:00am. She has complained to the management company, to no avail.
I consider myself lucky that these budding pianists are quite young and obviously reluctant to practice for long. I think one has a lesson at 8:30pm but that’s the latest that I hear the piano. I am thanking my lucky stars that, since they aren’t child prodigies, I’ll be moving out of here before either of them gets to Fur Elise!
Another Irish man was telling me that his upstairs neighbour has a huge dog that barks a lot. “Beijingers love their dogs!” But that too is another story for another time. Ohmigod, I have so much to tell you about.
Back soon, Sheila

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Photos

Third Ring Road looking north
- lots happening within this ring

hardworking man
- traditional and modern lifestyles co-habit easily

award-winning design of MOMA
- a multi-use complex

my neighbour's 6th Birthday
- they decorated the hallway

early morning drill
- EVERY morning at 7:30 ALL students do synchronised calistenics