I just finished reading 50 descriptive journal writings from my students. The assignment: describe your dormitory room. Be specific – use descriptive adjectives and nouns. Describe what you see, smell, hear, and feel in the room.

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

We have been in China for officially 8 days now, although it feels like a month. Initially, the culture shock hit us like a bus running a red light (a rather common occurrence here). Now that we’ve been here for a week now, things are starting to sort themselves out, including our couch situation.

On Wednesday, I taught my first class. They are 3rd year English/International Business students and started classes early because they didn’t have to do their military training (1st and 2nd year students have to do a couple weeks of training before the school year starts). There, I met Eric and Arthur, my class monitors. Their role is, basically, to help me survive. Really, it is. Arthur and Eric toured me around campus, showing me all of the mysterious buildings I hadn’t entered. They showed me the best lines to take on the bus (1 yuan as opposed to 9+ for a taxi). They introduced us to the small, tucked away cafeterias sprinkled around campus. Basically, they helped us feel like locals instead of tourists. Which is good, because we can’t afford to be tourists.

Most importantly, they helped us find our couch! Yes, when we moved into our apartment we found a disturbing lack of comfortable seating. The best advice we got was to check out the Beijing Ikea. We looked online, and the prices are “foreign goods” prices. For a basic futon, it would run an entire month’s salary! So, when Eric and Arthur asked me, “Is there anything we could help you find?” I had my list ready.

Both of them took their Saturday afternoon to help us shop. The first mall we checked out had prices comparable to Ikea and looked more like couches for the Nouveau Riche rather than the Nouveau Middle Class. Leaving that mall, we got a tip from the taxi driver to check out a warehouse-type mall. This is the kind of place that you only can find if you (or someone else you know) has been there before, i.e. we would never have found it on our own. After snaking through a Chinese open air grocery store, we happened upon the warehouse mall, or, what I shall now refer to as waremall. At the waremall, the building was packed with beds and couches, so much so that only two narrow passages allowed shoppers to get through. After finding prices within our budget, we shopped and found the perfect couch! Check out the couch in all of its plush glory:

This couch is so much more than a couch. Like Batman is the symbol of justice, this couch is the symbol of a big step in our acculturation. We had locals help us find this place. We finally found something we wanted at a good price. It makes us feel like we can not just survive, but live here.

We apologize for the lack of blogging recently. It turns out that moving to China takes a lot of time…

What we’ve been up to: left Chicago on August 12 with all of our belongings stuffed into 8 bags (the max allowed); flew to San Francisco to spend a few days with friends; visited Yosemite (amazing); left San Francisco on August 17; arrived in Hong Kong on August 18; spent a week adjusting to the time zone, seeing the sights, spending time with friends, and having an orientation with our organization (Jian Hua Foundation); boarded a train from Hong Kong to Guangzhou on August 25; went with Chinese friends in Guangzhou to get our luggage shipped to Tianjin (a city in the north, where we are teaching); ate lunch; realized we were running really late for our next train; huffed it to the next train station with wonderful Chinese friends helping to run with our remaining carry on luggage to get us there in time; made it just in the nick of time for our overnight sleeper train from Guangzhou to Beijing; spent two hours in our broken down train in the middle of the night (turns out they shut off the a/c when the train is stopped, so it got hot and uncomfortable really quickly); arrived in Beijing two hours late, with less than an hour to get from the train station where we arrived to the other train station where our final train to Tianjin was scheduled to leave; got separated from each other while running with more newfound Chinese friends to make the next train on time (the doors of the subway literally closed between us, leaving Angel trapped on one side while the subway took Matt and our Chinese friends away); cried when we finally found each other at the next train station (Angel had no working cell phone and never wrote down Matt’s Chinese cell phone number and free wi-fi in China is hard to come by); of course, missed our train from Beijing to Tianjin; called our contact at our school to see what we should do; had to spend the night in a Beijing hotel next to the train station since no one from the school could meet us that night; took an 8 am bullet train from Beijing to Tianjin yesterday morning; got to our campus; had a 1/2 hour tour that we barely remembered; got into our apartment….

So, that’s the shortened version of the past couple of weeks for us. Writing it all out, I’m surprised we’re not more stressed and tired than we are now.

I’ll elaborate a little more on getting into our apartment. Our contact at our school was kind of haphazardly showing us things around campus as soon as we arrived with her yesterday morning. (I don’t think she’s usually in charge of bringing new teachers in, so the info was kind of hard to follow and very quickly given.) Anyway, when she opened the door to our apartment, I thought she had said she was opening the door to our classroom. Then I saw a bedroom with two twin size beds in the room next to the “classroom.” Inward groan. So we have to sleep in the same area where we teach.

Then through a series of questions, I realized that both rooms were ours, part of our apartment. The room I thought was a classroom is our living room/office. There is also a separate kitchen and a Western style bathroom (complete with bathtub). Way more space than either of us were expecting! Much bigger than our apartment in America. So we were pretty thrilled.

After our tour was finished and we went back to the apartment, I discovered that things weren’t quite as rosy as I’d thought. The beds aren’t in great condition. The mattresses look like they’re about 30 years old, but okay, we can get a new bed. Then I started to notice the thick layer of dust that was on EVERYTHING in the apartment. The worst section was behind the TV, where there is a layer of dust that’s probably a couple of inches thick.

Granted, Tianjin is very dusty anyway, but this is outrageous. I’m pretty sure they didn’t clean the apartment all summer. The last teacher who lived there left a lot of things for us (hangers, clothesline, dishes, etc.) and I think he told the school very explicitly NOT to get rid of the stuff before we came. (Usually when the clean the apartments over the summer, they remove things the teachers try to leave behind for the next teacher and strip the whole place of everything but furniture.) Unfortunately, since they left the extra stuff alone, they also left all the dust alone. And the toilet stains. I immediately went into anal, OCD mode and started cleaning every crack, nook, and cranny in the apartment. Only the apartment is pretty big. So far, I’ve gotten through half of one room. It’s going to be a long week.

But we did find out some good news – Matt doesn’t start teaching until Wednesday. I don’t start teaching until next Monday (Sept 5). We were initially told we would have to start teaching Monday (as in tomorrow morning).

Right now, we’re sleeping on the old gross beds, but we only have one set of twin size sheets, plus a sheet that was supposed to be used as a tablecloth for our kitchen table. We washed the sheets, and we’re using one fitted sheet to cover one of the beds, the tablecloth sheet to cover the other bed, and the flat twin size sheet to cover both of us (we pushed the beds together so the sheet would sort of cover both of us at once.) Fortunately, it doesn’t get super cold at night yet and the morning is actually pretty hot, so the lack of bedding is okay for now.

Hopefully by this time next week, our apartment will be in great condition and we’ll even have a new bed or futon to sleep on.

Here are some pictures of our place:

Inside the doorway of our kitchen

Half of our kitchen, with fridge and shelves

The other side of our kitchen, with cabinets, sink and stovetop

The washing machine in the kitchen. One side is for wash and the other side is for spin. We have to hang to dry.

Our kitchen balcony

Our bathroom, complete with Western toilet

The Western bathtub/shower in our apartment. Haven't seen one of these in 2 weeks! A pleasant surprise.

The entryway to our apartment

Our bedroom

The view from our bedroom balcony...

...but we won't be going out there until we clean off the dust

Our living room/study, that I thought at first was a classroom

The other side of our living room, with a view of the hallway leading to the bathroom and kitchen

Pile of dust welcoming us.

The first day at our apartment, August 9th 2009

The last day at our apartment, July 31st, 2011

I used to be a cry baby when I was a kid. I’m not talking about ‘I broke my ankle so I’ll shed a tear’, I mean all out bawling. Like, at the end of The Land Before Time in first grade, I definitely cried. Somebody took my toy? Cry. Have to practice my cello? Cry. Bad haircut? Cry.

So, that’s why, as I got older, I tried to curb the waterworks since it’s not “cool” or “socially acceptable” for a teenage boy to cry. And, for most of my life since those awkward and emotional teenage years I haven’t all out bawled. I might shed a few tears at a funeral or emotional goodbye here or there (When Po found out that his family was killed in Kung Fu Panda 2? I might or might not have sniffled a little bit), but for the most part I’ve been pretty stoic.

Well, I broke my streak on Sunday night, July 31st. Angel and I moved out from our apartment in Naperville, I had a moment (albeit a long one) of real emotion as we drove away for the last time. Granted, we had been working pretty much non-stop the entire week selling most of our possessions on Craigslist, packing our bags to be ready for China, and cleaning our apartment. Getting rid of old stuff and moving really make me sentimental. But really, that was our place. P.S., Angel and me. As we pulled into a parking spot at Walgreens – our Walgreens – I couldn’t help but let it all out. Angel asked me, “So…are you going to do this every time you say goodbye to someone this next week?”

All that to say, we’ve made a big step towards China, and it’s suddenly and surprisingly more real than before. I’m feeling better about moving now that the packing is over.  As I look at most of my day-to-day life compressed into two 50 lb. suitcases and two carry-on bags, I’m reminded about how much of my stuff was unnecessary. And, how glad I’ll be when I’m done hauling them around airports, hostels, and trains.

Enjoy some before and after pics.

Before: Our stuff all over the apartment

After: All of our stuff, compressed