Home Sweet Hovel

Well, John thinks you would be interested in seeing our home away from home. It is quite the place. We love it for its proximity to the university but not particularly for its palatial amenities (or lack there of). Actually it is very adequate and fun--kind of like camping out in style. Our kitchen is more like a porch, long and skinny. We have no hot water in the kitchen but are hoping to induce our friend Mr. Zhao to put in a splitter to divert some of our lovely hot shower water (which never runs out!) to the kitchen sink. We will see how that goes. Meanwhile we are delighted to have a hot-plate pitcher which heats dish water in just a few minutes, a great little toaster oven in which I am able to make a 3/4 sized loaf of no-knead bread, baked in a clay casserole dish. We also have a little dining area with a small fridge, two bedrooms, each with a desk so we have "private" offices a modest living room, and a shower/bathroom complete with western toilet (which runs constantly but we haven't yet been able to find the new internal workings to fix it and it doesn't seem bad enough yet to capture Mr. Zhao's attention.) I actually think pictures are worth a thousand words when it comes to our living quarters so I am going to stack up the pictures with little commentary. John and I have laughed for years that we could be happy in the city dump as long as we were together. We have had a good laugh about having spoken self-fulfilling prophecy since we have now arrived precisely there. The approach is less than appealing but we have a lock-out door and feel very safe and have neighbors who are wonderfully friendly and helpful to these two foreigners who speak so little Chinese it is embarrassing. We also have a number of foreign "experts" (teachers) like we are who are from Russia, Japan, Germany, New Zealand, and France, besides a couple from the USA. We all live happily in our humble homes--which I might add are very comfortable compared to what many of the neighboring Chinese families live in. We have no complaints. This last week we even added to the luxury of our environment by buying carpet runners to warm up our tile floors. It is now very crisp and cold autumn weather. The government doesn't allow any heat to be turned on until November 15, we hear. Yikes. Local shops will do a bang up business selling space heaters. I think that will be our next purchase.