As I was reading, I thought how maybe I should practice what I teach from time to time. And what better place to practice than our blog? So here is a teacher’s descriptive essay of our apartment (post-massive-cleaning at the beginning when we first moved in, of course).

When you approach our building, the first thing you will likely notice is the broken front door. It’s an ugly shade of green and made of metal. Even though there have been many attempts to fix it, the front door does not latch all the way, unless you push it firmly shut. Even though you are not supposed to be able to get into the building without a key or a buzz-in from someone inside, 99% of the time, you can simply walk right in. This makes me feel unsafe sometimes, knowing that someone with bad intent has one less obstacle to face. But other times, I’m grateful for our broken front door (like when I don’t have the keys with me and Matt’s not home to let me in.)

Once you come inside the building, you have to climb three flights of dirty steps. Sometimes the cleaning lady mops, but the floors never stay clean for long. On the third floor, you enter our apartment on the left. We live across from an Arabic teacher from Iraq, who we usually never see. The middle apartment next to us is empty. Since our neighbors are non-existent or quiet, our apartment is fairly quiet. Every now and then we can hear our upstairs neighbor’s cell phone vibrate. (It’s so creepy because it sounds like it’s in the room with us.) Apart from that, and the occasional sound of firecrackers (which Chinese people set off for every wedding…there are some going off right now, in fact), our apartment is quiet.

When you open our door, you see a shoe and coat rack filled with shoes and slippers. When we’re busy, we usually have various pairs of shoes and slippers scattered on the floor near the door, as well as some miscellaneous school items (bags of students’ journals, the cart we use for transporting our class items, etc.) The hall area is dark, since it doesn’t get any direct light, but we have a ceiling light we can turn on when it’s dark and we don’t want to trip over our mess.

Directly across from the front door is our bedroom. There is a small closet built into the room, along with a separate wooden wardrobe that we rescued from the furniture pile outside and a fabric wardrobe that the previous teacher left for us. The fabric wardrobe is printed with a nice pastoral scene of two-story white houses next to an ocean with mountains in the distance. Sailboats sail on the ocean, and horses graze next to the houses. I’m sure the previous teacher bought the wardrobe in China, but the picture looks nothing like China. I think they were trying to include the most beautiful parts of America in one scene, but it really doesn’t even look like something you’d see in America.

We also have two wooden desks in our bedroom and two twin size beds pushed together. The desks are usually covered with schoolwork we are working on. We each have small plastic shelving units to organize our classes’ materials. Mine are always stacked with students’ journals. About a foot behind our desks, we have two twin size beds pushed together. We have mismatching blue/green sheets on them. Next to the beds, there are two small wooden side tables.

To the left of our bedroom, there is a living room. We have a small round table for eating, two red futons, a small coffee table, a tall bookshelf, and a shelf where we keep pictures and paperwork. When we aren’t using it for classes, we keep our projector on top of the bookshelf and project it onto the opposite wall to watch movies or play Kinect. The living room is my favorite room in the apartment because it lets a lot of sun in and feels brighter and happier than the other more gloomy rooms.

Down the hall from the living room, we have a bathroom on the left. The bathroom has a Western toilet and bathtub. The bathroom is the smelliest room in the house because the toilet leaks water out the bottom every time it’s flushed. There is also a drain on the floor next to the toilet that smells rancid, even though we keep it covered with a plunger to try and block the smell. Some days it doesn’t smell as strongly, but other days, like today, it reeks. To block out the smell, we spray floral air freshener in the bathroom.

The Western bathtub is a great luxury in China (most bathroom just have a shower that comes onto the ground near the toilet), so we’re grateful for it. The only bad thing about the bathtub is that the caulk around it is rotten and falling apart, so I’m a little afraid one day the bathtub is going to fall out. I definitely tread lightly whenever I take a shower.

To the left of the bathroom, directly across from the living room, is the kitchen. The kitchen has a small refrigerator and freezer unit, a washing machine, a small toaster oven, a rice cooker, a 2-burner gas stovetop, a sink, a plastic electric kettle, a small portable island, and a tall shelving unit. The kitchen floor gets dirty easily since water splashes out from the sink and the washing machine and then we track dirt all over the place. I used to avoid the kitchen except to help with dishes and laundry, since cooking stresses me out under normal conditions, and cooking in China stresses me out even more. (Precise measurements aren’t entirely possible here, because you have to substitute for a lot of ingredients, and they also aren’t measured out the way we would do it in the US.) But after our Halloween party, I manned up (or womaned up?) and tried out some baking. It went much better than expected, so now I’ve actually organized the kitchen somewhat and felt less afraid to go in it. So far my successful dishes include: Severed Witches Finger Cookies, Newt’s Eyes Deviled Eggs, roasted pumpkin seeds, and mutton and bok choy pizza.

Hope you enjoyed a descriptive essay tour of our apartment

It’s a pretty handy system; the only problem is we get lazy and go for a few weeks without menu planning before we realize how stressed we (and more honestly, I) get without planning menus ahead of time and how much more tempted we are to go out to eat when we haven’t planned anything out.

In our times of planning, I’ve come across some great new recipes. You have to understand, I grew up without cooking anything, except spaghetti and macaroni and cheese. Everything else, I made in a toaster or a microwave. My parents had a few meals that they liked to cook, but I guess I never got around to learning how to make those meals. And other than that, we just weren’t the kind of family that sits around cooking together.

Even now, when we have a big family get-together, the smoke alarm usually goes off several times before the cooking has finished.

So keeping my genetic tendency to dislike cooking in mind, I’m pretty proud of my recent accomplishments (even though they actually are baking, which I enjoy a lot more than cooking.) Here’s a photographic journey:

Homemade bread!

Perfect sandwich bread, made with organic flour

Homemade organic stuffed crust pizza!

What are your favorite things to make in the kitchen?

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