As a follow-up to the previous post about our fully furnished apartment, it seems appropriate to mention a few things that that we find to be different in our China apartment vs. our house in America. Starting in the main bathroom, it’s not unusual to hang the water heater above the toilet:
While it provides rapidly available hot water, you should be careful when standing up fast. Since all of the walls in the house are concrete or tile, we use a lot of suction cup racks and sticky hooks. Thankfully, some work really well, like this towel rack in our shower:
Our shower also has a “convenient” metal door for access to the water shutoff valve. I ended up caulking it in order to keep it closed and reduce the flow of rusty water down the tile:
Although I do not like to drill into the landlord’s tile walls, I made an exception to install this heat lamp to take the chill off those cool mornings:
Of course, our guest bathroom toilet is a bit shorter than many in the west:
The solid walls prevent the installation of closets, so here is our “coat closet”:
Meanwhile, in the kitchen, we sacrificed some of the precious counter space for our “oven” and microwave. Note that the rechargeable gas meter is located inside instead of outside:
Since there aren’t any drawers in the kitchen, Susan assembled this rack to hold the utensil trays:
Outside, China has a parking problem, with cars squeezed into every available space. These cars are actually in a no-parking zone, and the officers can often be seen sticking tickets on the windows:
Ironically, the huge parking garages in the basement of our apartment buildings are practically empty:
A friend told us that these spaces are actually sold to individual owners for about $5000 USD. With that in mind, people are more than willing to take the risk of getting a lot of $10 parking tickets.
Finally, we often get a chuckle out of the titles of our neighborhood bulletin boards:
As always, it looks like we have a lot more “propaganda” than just plain “notices.”
I am saddened to see that a week has gone by without anyone commenting on this post.