Apartment Hunt: Part 2

My New Apartment:

2 bedrooms, 1 bath
1 large kitchen
2 balconies - one for cooking, one for drying laundry and/or drinking morning coffee
1 large living room
1 50" plasma TV (yes, included!)
fully furnished with 2 bedroom sets, a washing machine, a white sofa and chair, the TV, 3 glass-top tables, patio furniture and some cooking appliances

First thing, for those of you who want to know, I did sell my lime green couch....it's in a very nice home now and my very expensive trend of getting a new couch each year continues. *sigh*

Let's see - my apartment is on the 5th floor of a newer building in a very nice apartment complex. It's located about 5 minutes from the back gate of my old campus, in fact, I can see my old teaching building out my bedroom window! Oh, and when I say that my apartment is on the 5th floor, this is in a building with no elevator. Apartment buildings with 6 floors or fewer are not required to put in an elevator! So, for me this means four things:

1. I'm lucky I'm not my upstairs neighbor.
2. I've gotten into a good habit of standing at my door and thinking about my day before I walk down the stairs. This eliminates forgetting something and having to walk back up the stairs.
3. I have really awesome friends who actually volunteered to move me in.
4. I'm really out of shape.

Now that I have to pay for my own apartment and utilities I actually have to learn HOW to do all of that. My landlady is covering the cable - check. Tony's friend is taking care of the internet - check. Tony and my new roommate will be helping me to turn in the payments for water, electricity and gas - check! Before this lovely system turns from my own ideals to reality, though, I have to figure some of it out on my own. Here's an example from my first 9 days in the apartment before I left for the states:

Electricity... In China, you have to buy units of electricity for your apartment and when those units run out, well...you're sitting in the dark. No one warned me during my first two days that running the wall air conditioner would pretty much zap all of my electricity credit. (I mean, I'm used to running it whenever I feel like it in my old place...even all night!) After the second night of doing this I woke up, was checking my email and boom - all systems down. I thought...no big deal, I'll just hop in the shower and then go buy some more units. After hopping in the shower, I hopped right back out as I realized that my water heater runs on electricity. Thinking I'd dry my soaking hair I went for my hair dryer...electricity. Apparently I am super dependent on electricity because I then went to charge my dying phone... Duh! Eventually, I got the point but as you can see, it took me a while!

There have been some other things that I've suddenly realized I have to do with the help of friends, not just by picking up the phone and asking the school to take care of it. Fixing the rusted shower, trying to make a device to keep my bathroom from flooding each time I take a shower and attempting to stop the stinky sewage smell...again, the bathroom!

After all of this, I've realized that I had it REALLY GOOD these past two years. Oh, someone please take care of me!!! :)