Zai ZhongGuo Zhao Fangzi 101

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A week ago, I was fairly happy with my living conditions, enjoying the variety of food Kunming had to offer, started meeting new people, classes had begun and I was making my way around pretty easily. Things were going smooth for the most part, and then it struck. I was hit with my first bout of food poisoning. I’ll spare you the details, but I was sick with the worst of it starting Wednesday night, then I was generally weak for the next couple of days. The general weakness involved me walking somewhere when suddenly it felt like a giant hand was reaching inside my stomach, grabbing a hold of all the organs in my stomach cavity and squeezing and twisting them around for about 10 seconds, then release, so I could breathe again. It was a most unpleasant experience.

During this time, as you might imagine, I spent a lot of time in the toilet room in the dorm building. Well, not only did I have to make my way down a seemingly endless hallway to get to it, but the toilet room’s level of cleanliness had deteriorated to visually disgusting and unhealthy conditions due to the lack of a person to come and clean them. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal back home, but here you can’t throw paper in the toilet, therefore the 50 odd people (I actually don’t know how many people actually live here, but that is based on the number of rooms) living on the floor began to throw their used paper and other items on the floor because for some unknown reason, the little baskets for waste paper that had been there disappeared. After the 3rd day of this, my roommate and I told the school office (because also along with all the construction workers and the waste paper baskets, the front desk guard had also disappeared). But nothing changed. After the 5th day (with two days of sickness) we went back to the office and refused to leave until someone cleaned the dorm’s toilet room and shower rooms. They finally came and took away the trash but still didn’t actually clean the toilets. (Note: since then, I guess they hired someone, because they have been coming to clean more regularly)

The point of this gross tale is that during this time my roommate and I decided that we did not want to live the next year in this environment, so we decided to look for an apartment where we could live comfortably, have a clean bathroom, cook in a kitchen, relax in a living room, study in individual bedrooms and keep our lights on as long as we want at night (the dorms randomly cut our electricity at midnight). Plus, her boyfriend is coming to live and study here for the semester and he would live with us too.

So in a mood of disappointment (we had hoped to stay in the dorms this year to avoid using our savings) we began the apartment hunt. For us, because we cannot read the Chinese websites advertising rental properties, we wanted to find something quickly and we were looking for an apartment of our own rather than a room in an apartment, we needed to go through an agency versus finding something on the expat website GoKunming, which is a great resource for this type of thing otherwise. The process is far from smooth, as you might imagine. Also, keep in mind that this is all being done in Chinese. (In my case, my roommate is amazing and able to communicate our needs and gather information, plus a new friend who has lived here two years and speaks Chinese was kind enough to help us to make sure everything was on the up and up…as best he can with these types of transitions between different cultures…in our case three different cultures.)

在中国找房子101
(Zai Zhong Guo zhao fangzi 101 = Looking for an apartment in China 101)
1. Find an agency. How do you find the agency? There is a rental agency on practically every other block, especially in the area by our school they are even more concentrated. We recognize the agencies because they have pieces of paper taped to their windows listing properties for sale and for rent and basic details about each, in Chinese.
2. You go inside and tell them what you are looking for (example: a 2-3 bedroom apartment, kitchen, hot water, location, etc.). They think about what properties they have and tell you the cost. If you want to look at it, you and the agent gets up and walks to the apartment to have a look. Note: The way the agency gets a property is that the landlord contacts them and lists their property with the agent. So, you have to go to many agencies to see different apartments, so occasionally you can come across the same on listed with more than one agency. But it is really a crapshoot and often the agency hasn’t even seen the apartment they are going to show you, so in reality they don’t know too much about the properties and don’t really do anything in terms of helping match your needs to an apartment besides price and number of rooms.
3. You walk.
4. You walk some more.
5. You climb stairs. Lots of stairs. (Elevators? It seems they are only for buildings with more, say 10ish floors)
6. You examine the apartment. First impressions are pretty huge and in most cases it was very easy to eliminate apartments. Some are furnished, some are unfurnished.
7. You pick one. So, you find one that you like and the price is fine.
8. Negotiate and meet the landlord. So, you like the apartment but it is missing something you want or need. The agency calls the landlord and requests/negotiates for these things. (This process took two days for us.) Once everything is agreed upon (often reluctantly on both sides but with a smile) you meet the landlord, look over the apartment another time! (Important because we found things that needed repairing the second time we looked…like a toilet that didn’t flush and a shower door that did not close), then sign a contract (parts of the paperwork are handwritten and you seal your signature with a stamp of your right thumb soaked from a pad of red ink-but they always have a tissue ready for you).
9. You pay. You pay a lot (of course, it is all relative. The cost of an apartment here is a fraction of rent at home and for those of you who know how much I paid in rent in DC-one month’s rent there will cover me for 4 month’s here, but I’m a student without an income…so it is still a lot for me). You pay the landlord the entire rent (or an agreed upon portion of the rent), pay the agency fee (typically a month’s rent but can and should be negotiated), pay a deposit…then in our case we found an unfurnished apartment, so we will need to pay for basic appliances (fridge and washing machine) and furniture (beds/table/coffee table). We found that we can buy these things at second-hand markets and get what we want for a reasonable price and less than renting a furnished apartment with so-so furnishings, even though it will be more work. Additional costs will be cleaning service for initial cleaning, monthly bills for electricity, water, trash collections, guard fees, internet service, food, cleaning supplies and other small household items.
10. Move in.
11. Finally study?

So, now you can all rent an apartment in China. Any questions? Ha! OMG, it was not fun. I feel especially thankful for my roommate who had to work double hard to communicate using her Chinese. I could only understand a tenth of what was being said. Because we decided to look for an apartment after the rush of new students, we didn’t have a huge selection plus we were really tired and (sick) and just wanted to get it settled because during the last week studying has had to take a backseat to getting the apartment figured out and I really need to study. So, we ended up picking a three bedroom apartment about 5 minutes from our classroom building. It is on a road referred to as the “foreigner road” and even though we didn’t necessarily want that, it is close to school, so it works well and is a popular area. It is on the 6th floor, which sux, but hopefully it will keep the apartment cleaner, my butt thinner and we can get a breeze because we are not blocked by other buildings. The three bedrooms are good because hopefully we can rent the third one to someone else once my roommate’s boyfriend returns home or if at anytime we want to lower our rent per person, at least we have the option. Until then we have a guest room/office.

We had been wavering on whether it was a good idea to get an unfurnished apartment or not, since we’ll have to sell everything we buy at the end of the year or chalk it up to a loss. Then we were walking home from dinner after visiting the second-hand market on Sunday and we came across random couches and lounge chairs that were strewn about the sidewalk near campus. It was nighttime and most people that happened by would continue on, but we stopped and checked out the furniture. It had clearly been thrown out from the shop it was in front of which looked abandoned and didn’t belong to anyone, plus it was all in pretty decent shape, so we decided to take it! Also, there was a Chinese dude standing nearby and he helped us to pick out pieces that we wanted (kind of odd but isn’t everything here!) After awhile though we started to lose hope because none of the taxis that came by agreed to transport the pieces. So, after 10 or so minutes the Chinese dude lets on that he has a truck coming to carry all the pieces away somewhere. We offered him money to take the pieces we wanted to our friend’s apartment and he agreed. Soooo…now that we had auspiciously stumbled upon a living room set, we had to take the apartment!

Well, yesterday we got our keys, today-as I type-the apartment is being scrubbed from top to bottom…on our dime, and hopefully we’ll return to the market by the end of the week to bargain and buy the rest of what we need and have that delivered. In the next couple of weeks I can share the after photos to go with these before photos and look forward to getting sick in our very own bathroom.

And so I will leave you with this advice—Grab a good magazine and enjoy your toilets folks! Because there are children starving in….oh wait, that’s another story.

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Photos

Dining Room
Dining room/living room are just one big room.

Living Room View
They are in one of the bedrooms.

Bathroom
It is dirty here, but being cleaned before we move in.

Comments

[Magoo]

Nice porcelain!!!
Rule of asia is never pass up clean porcelain... shoot me the snail mail address when you are in!! Cipro is your freind !!!!

[Anand]

Looks great!
Can't wait to see it furnished with your free furniture!

[Carie]

Nice the new place has a sit-down sh!tter too. Nothing's worse than bacterial dysentery squatting over a hole.

[Elyse]

Yikes
Soooo incredibly glad that you're feeling better and found an apartment!