Our Apartment

After we arrived in Hong Kong, we were picked up by a driver who took us through the Chinese border and onward to our apartment in Shekou. We're only about a 5 minute drive from the border, so no wonder they flew us into Hong Kong! When we got here we were met by Jack (local staff who's in charge of assiting staff with apartments and settling in) and Lisa (an American who will be my director of instruction at the elementary school). 

 

We live in a complex called Coastal Rose Garden and we're on the 9th floor. The complex is really huge, with dozens of apartment buildings, and it stretches all along the waterfront overlooking Hong Kong.

 

When we got here there was an awesome gift basket full of valuable items for any newcomer: maps, guide books, toilet paper, chips, juice, wine, milk, water, towels and lots of other things. It was really, really nice of the school to provide these things for us.

My first impression was that the apartment was huge, especially compared to what we were given in Korea. This place is twice the size of our apartment in Ontario too, and it's FREE. So, let me go ahead and give you a tour:

In this picture, our front door is on the right hand side. There's a shoe closet right there and the dining room table on the left. The first entrance on the right is the kitchen and on the left is a weird little room mostly full of stuff from the previous tenants. We're keeping that door shut :D 

 

Example of creepy art left behind in that little room.

This is our kitchen. Pretty normal. Lots of counter space, but not a lot of usable cupboard space. We were pleasantly surprised that there was a microwave (one less thing to buy!), and not at all surprised by the lack of an oven (one more thing to buy!).

This is the living room- it's on the opposite side of the dining room. It came with a sofa (never had one of those before overseas!), a TV and DVD player with surround sound, and (most strangely) a piano.

 

The living room, from the other side.

 

 There's a huge balcony off the living room with a washing machine on it...

 

...and THIS is our amazing view from the balcony.

 

This is the hallway leading from the living/dining room area down to the bedrooms.

 

This is the spare bedroom. Lots of room for visitors *HINT HINT*. Currently being used to store cat things and the ironing board.

 

Across from the spare bedroom is the office. There's a desk and lot of storage space in there.

At the end of the hall is this pretty typical Asian bathroom, but better than we've ever had simply due to the size and the existence of a shower curtain to keep everything from getting wet!

Here's our bedroom! It's awesome! We have a king sized bed, and light switches on either side that control his and hers lamps. There's also SO MUCH cabinet space to store all of our clothes.

 

This is the amazing view from our bedroom. We can see Hong Kong from our bed. Crazy!

 And this is my favorite part. The biggest surprise of all. In the master bathroom we have a JACUZZI. Can you believe it? A jacuzzi! A jacuzzi with a CD player! In our Korean apartment we once bought an inflatable kid's pool just to take a bath.

Also, all the fixtures in this bathroom are glass so it looks really nice in there. We love it.

 

Like I said earlier, the grounds of Coastal Rose Garden are huge. There's a boardwalk that goes all along the water. On the grounds, we're lucky enough to have a pool that we can use any time, a gym, ping pong and tennis courts, and every building has a row of shops in it. And almost all the shops of full of foreign import goods and restaurants. It's literally amazing.

 

Rude statue outside our building.

And we're just a block away from a great shopping and dining area. But I'll post more about that later. It's going to be tough exploring China if we never want to leave our apartment!

In Bloom

When it's not crawling with cockroaches (we've officially been roach-free for a full week now) or crawling with loud tramps (thanks for the recent silence, apartment 404) there are some things I actually like about our apartment. Right now, we're enjoying this explosion of cheery white blossoms on the tree outside our bedroom window. I'd trade bugs for flowers any day.

'Partment Problems

When your apartment is only slightly larger than a shoebox there are a limited number of things that can go wrong with the fixtures within. Recently though, it seems like there's a new problem every week.

Take our upstairs neighbors, for example. Never heard a peep out of them up until a few months ago. Now, every night (and only on work nights, for some reason) they are driving us up the wall. They don't usually get home until a little after midnight and then it begins- the drunken girly laughing and giggling. This usually escalates into drunken thumping, falling down and (for some reason) late-night vacuuming. Usually around 2am they've started the drunken screaming (it sounds like the killer from the Scream movies has just snuck into their room). We pound on the ceiling, to no avail (English knocking is not understood). Then they fall asleep with their phones on the floor which vibrate on our ceiling over and over through the night. We wake up in the morning and there's puke and cigarettes in the stairwell. I hate them.

Two weeks ago, Mel texted me at school to let me know that it smelled like gas in the apartment. I got my school to send the gas guy over to our apartment to check it out, but he said there was no problem. We were relieved! But then, last Saturday night, our gas powered Boiler exploded. Ash lined the wall and ceiling. Water leaked from the bottom of it all weekend and we had no hot water for two days before my school sent another guy to fix it. It's fine now.

But then came the most disturbing change of all- we have cockroaches!!! This apartment has never really been insect free- in the summer we had wasps letting themselves in to hang out, and in the fall we had a rotten stint of mosquitoes, but cockroaches is a new low.

After our weekend away in Andong we walked in to our place to find a roach crawling around in the sink. After killing it, I opened up the cupboard to get a cup and there was another one crawling on our cups!! Ahhhhh!!!! During the debate about who was going to kill this massively disgusting creature, it disappeared somewhere and now it's living free among us... walking on our faces as we sleep, I suspect.

It's a small apartment, but the location is amazing, it's free and it's functional. Actually, it's more than free- we get paid to live here thanks to Mel's housing subsidy. Mel hates it, but I've stuck up for it in the past. However, these recent developments are wearing me down. It's hard to deny that living in a cockroach nest isn't a hit to your quality of life. I can't help but think that our first 1-bedroom apartment in Canada is going to feel like a palace in comparison.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have a ceiling to bang on and a cockroach to hunt down.

UPDATE: We had 2 more roaches visit our laundry room on Sunday night and on Monday morning there were three in our bathroom! Mel bought some Raid for us on her way home from work and I bought some bleach to pour down the drains. It's war, roaches!!!

UPDATE 2: We have now been roach-free for a full 24 hours! In addition to being extremely effective, the Raid has also had another pleasant side effect: spraying a whole can of it in the air yesterday has left our place smelling of the sweet floral scent of poison. Life is finally getting back on track.

Caribbean Bay Take 2

We'd been to Caribbean Bay once before and it was pretty fun, aside from the fat jokes and life jackets required for knee-deep water, but it was absolutely not worth a $65 admission fee. So, today when we went to the park and saw the price was a full $25 more than we'd paid on our last visit we decided to pass on the park for the day, even though we had traveled all the way there.

So what did Mr. and Mrs. Cheapskate do after leaving the overpriced and over-crowded park?

We went to E-Mart and bought our own damn pool. For our living room. For 1/6th of the price. Piss off, Caribbean Bay.

Thomas The Cat

Facts about Thomas the cat (AKA Tom Tom AKA Tonnes of Fun):

- he has herpes

- he's half-ginger

- we are cat-sitting him for two weeks

- we thought our apartment wasn't big enough for us to have a cat. Turns out, Tonnes of Fun has absolutely no interest in leaving the bed and only does so to eat and poop. Which is something we both have in common.

- he weighs approximately nine million pounds

- during the day he likes to sleep at the foot of the bed; at night he likes to sleep on your face

- he is 100% love and 0% beast

- he has the second-worst breath in the house

- not a fan of tuna

- he's missing half of an ear (the sick way Seoul City shows that he's fixed)

- he's a huge Big Brother UK fan and really wants John James and Josie to finally get together

- we love him

Neighbors

We live in a pretty quiet building in Seoul, and aside from some random clompy high heels going through the halls some nights, we rarely hear from anyone in our building. This is nice because we've lived near some really annoying people in the past. I'm talking about you, Amy and Quan.

Unfortunately, the same can't be said for our neighbors in the next building. They have a baby that cries for hours on end, day or night. At first I thought, "I hate your baby", but now I think I hate the parents. For the longest time we wondered why we've only rarely heard them consoling this crying child and then we figured it out: they're probably not home.

I hope this doesn't wind up like the story from the last apartment building we lived in in Korea:
Couple: Internet gaming addiction led to baby's death

Home Sweet Box

I can't believe it's already been a month since we were first shown to our new apartment by our whiskey-drenched housing co-coordinator. I expected it to be approximately the size of a large box and my expectations were basically met. It's small but it's hella free and we love the location. Even though the place is about a third of the size of our place in Taiwan it's way more comfortable because:

a)everything isn't made out of wicker and
b)there's indoor heating

Please, let me take you on a grand tour. This is the living room. It's also the bedroom, the office, and the kitchen. It saves me from walking to different rooms, so I see this as a big advantage.

Thirsty? The fridge is never more than a few steps away. And the spacious area to the right of the bed offers plenty of room for an air mattress for visitors (HINT HINT). There's even a laundry room (which is only slightly larger than the washer itself) which is currently doubling as a den. The coffee maker and TV are already in there and I plan to stick a laz-e-boy in there as well... and maybe a dart board. Oh yeah, it's gonna be a sweet year.

Humidity

Check out the leather bracelet I left on a ledge near the wall in my bedroom. A few days ago I noticed it was growing mushrooms! There were some other things on the ledge that had a new layer of white on them too, upon closer inspection the walls and windows were growing black grossness on them, and our sheets and pillows are always feeling damp lately.

I think it's time to take all the bags off the dehumidifier.

Slipping Into Madness

Mosquitoes.

They are driving us absolutely crazy. I can't even count how many hours of sleep the two of us have lost in the past month or so. The problem is so bad that you'd think we lived in the middle of the forest and slept with our windows wide open. Every single night we are woken up multiple times with these vampires buzzing in our ears and feeding off our faces. And as soon as you wake up, turn on the light, let your eyes adjust, search for the bug, kill it and turn the light back off... eeeeEEEEEEE there's another one buzzing in your ear. I've had this happen SIX TIMES IN A ROW before and at 4am this is really annoying.

Since the weather has gotten colder we've noticed more mosquitoes in our apartment but in the last month it's been horrible. You'd think they wouldn't be so bad in colder weather but we use a space heater and I think they're drawn to the heat in our apartment. When we first noticed the problem we went over the place with a fine tooth comb to make sure there were no windows open or any cracks where they could get in. The only thing we thought might be letting them in was the air conditioners that we have in each room, so we taped and bagged them all up so there was no way anything could get in through them. Looks good, doesn't it?

I was pretty sure that sealing off the air conditioners was going to take care of the problem but, of course, it didn't. Unable to think of a better way to keep them out of the apartment, we bought a weapon to fight them off once they were in. Electric bug zappers work pretty well and they're quite satisfying but we still had to rely on killing them by hand and with books most of the time. We weren't getting any farther ahead.

Last night we were assaulted. We were first woken up at 4am and spent the next hour, sleepless, killing 5 mosquitoes and we still woke up covered in bites. It was time to make a desperate move: we bought a mosquito net. That's right- they're not just for Africa anymore. If this doesn't work, I honestly don't know what we're going to do but it's probably going to involve either a hotel or a plane ticket because I feel like they're making me go crazy. Wish us luck tonight..... I think we need it.

Dear Mosquitos,

...if you want to hang out, how about not letting me know by buzzing in my ear at 2am? And then again at 4am? And then again at 6am? I'm a little temperamental at those hours and I will squish you. Also, how about realizing it's winter and just agreeing to die off for a few months?

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go buy some magic erasers to clean the 1,000,002,452,029 dead mosquito bodies from the last week off my walls. As my friend Cathy would say:

*end tantrum*

A Dinosaur Restaurant Birthday Party

We couldn't get reservations at the Airplane-themed restaurant last night, so we decided to go back to the dinosaur restaurant, Jurassic, that we visited last month. Since the menu is WEIRD we decided to go to Burger King first and just have drinks at the restaurant.


This didn't stop Nareesa from ordering a snack of cuttlefish MOUTHS!! It was just a plate full of little round MOUTHS. I didn't try this dish, but she and Mark were adamant that it tasted pretty good.


I don't know how they decided on mouths as a snack, especially when delicious fish chins were also available to order.

The last time we were at Jurassic there was a woman singing with live MIDI-keyboard accompaniment and she must have sang "Happy Birthday" to about forty different tables. She was performing again last night, so we advised the male keyboardist (who had the most amazing perm, btw) that it was Christine's birthday. Actually, I believe Christine advised him that it was her own birthday, but either way she wound up being serenaded a little while later. Please note that it was not actually her birthday. They started out with a traditional rendition of "Happy Birthday" (catch the tail-end of the performance in the video above).


Then they moved on to a sped-up version of "Happy Birthday" and randomly passed the mic to Mel to finish the last verse. She put a lot of soul into that verse, I promise you.


At the end of the night we all huddled around the calculator to determine who owed what for which deep fried mouths. It never works out evenly so the birthday girl spent the next two hours demanding "23" from me. That's 60 cents. I promise, I'm good for it!


The other teachers live in the school dorms and have to be home by 10pm every night, but regardless, around 11:30 we marched into the Longshan Temple night market and ordered some shaved ice and ice cream wraps. Rebels! The five of us piled into a taxi (which is always cute) and headed back to ol' Sinjhuang. When Mel and I got off the elevator to our floor our neighbors were waiting to surprise us with a new mattress for our bed. Unwilling to blow hundreds of dollars on a mattress, we've slept on an air mattress since we moved here! So, we carried the mattress in, observed that it was rock-hard like all Asian mattresses, covered it in foam padding and blankets, and went right to sleep. Hard as it is, it still beats an air mattress.

So the best part of this night? For the first time ever, I didn't lose my wallet after leaving the Jurassic Restaurant. Success!

It's All Good In The Hood

Thought I'd post this image from Google Earth of our neighborhood. I've helpfully color-coded some important areas for the interested reader. The yellow blob is our apartment, the red circle is Mel's school, the green circle is where we catch the bus to the subway or the Carrefour/IKEA (just off the screen to the right), the purple circle is the awesome Sinjhuang Night Market. The blue dot? That's where an old lady sells our favorite little custard cream cakes from her trusty cart.

If you want to poke around the area on Google Earth the lat & long are as follows:

Latitude- 25° 2'9.71"N
Longitude-121°27'16.11"E

Finding An Apartment In Taiwan

Finding an apartment in Taiwan was not as easy as we thought it might be- and we never thought it would be easy. The rental system here requires that the renters pay the first months' rent plus 2 additional months' rent as a deposit. Unless you can find an apartment through a personal connection you would probably have to go through a rental agency and they generally charge an additional months' rent as their service fee. Though the cost of rent here is much lower than at home, it still adds up when you're multiplying it by 3 or 4 as a start-up cost.


When we first arrived in Taiwan we stayed at the dorms on the campus of the school where Mel works. Although we always knew this was temporary and it was *free*, it got old pretty fast. We knew that we wouldn't be staying in the same room ahead of time, which was okay as a short-term thing. Since the lads and the ladies had separate floors, we bought ourselves a set of walkie talkies to keep in touch. Mel's room had a private shower and bathroom with a rock hard bed, while I shared washroom facilities with the students and slept on an air mattress that turned out to be more comfortable than Mel's bed. The more unlivable features of dorm life were of course not revealed to us until we arrived. Despite what the recruiters said, there were no kitchen facilities, so every meal had to be bought and there was a 10pm curfew. Even on weekends! Even when there were no students due to an H1N1 outbreak! And one night they randomly decided to close the gates at 9:30 without telling us, so we had to break in. I'm pretty sure that was our last night living there.


After a few days in Taiwan we found out that an apartment across the road from the school had become available because a former teacher had moved out. Because we didn't know where I would be working, we kind of held off on the decision for a while. We thought we'd live in Banchio, the next town over (about 10 mins on the bus) so that we'd be on the subway line for easy access to any potential places of employment. We started visiting rental agents, like the smiley fellow above, but just as we couldn't speak much Mandarin they couldn't speak much English and 8 out of 10 agencies laughed us right out the door! At one agency we spoke to a guy who went inside to see if any of his co-workers could speak enough English to help us and I saw him physically push another guy towards the door to speak to us! Then another guy offered us a place the size of a shoebox for a price at the upper echelon of our budget. We had gotten really frustrated with dorm life and really frustrated with rental agencies.



So we decided to look at the apartment across from the school. The schools' guidance counselor, who had lived there 2 years prior, introduced us to the owners/potential neighbors. The apartment was much larger than I would have pictured an Asian apartment being- it had a bathtub (also rare here) and the landlords spoke perfect English. As well, they only wanted one month's deposit and the price was right- about $200 each per month. We've been here for about a week and have done a lot of cleaning- the last people that lived here were DIRTY, but we are 100% happy with our place. Please enjoy a tour of the place by watching the above video. It's going to be a comfortable base for our adventures this year and it's so nice to be able to stay up past 10pm! If anyone out there is ever in the DaGuan Road area, you should drop by for a visit.

Modern Technology

We'd gone three months cooking on a hot plate so we decided to treat ourselves to an oven on our last payday. We'd looked around and found one we liked at the Hi-Mart (pronounced Hi-Mart-uh), but for some reason we couldn't just take it home- it had to be delivered. I'd run into this problem before at the Home Plus (pronounced Home Plus-uh) so I think it's a Korea "thing". Well, one of the key aspects of the delivery system is the store's ability to call you before they deliver your item and we didn't have a phone. So we agreed to return to the store 4 days later to pick up the box ourselves. So what did we do all day Saturday? BAKE. Mel made some awesome hashbrowns to go with our breakfast, than I made us BBQ chicken pizzas for supper and then we ruined a batch of cookies. They were more pancake than cookie but I blame the wonky Korean ingredients: such as the brown sugar that was clearly just white granulated sugar colored brown, or the baking soda labeled 'eating soda'. Learning curve: the thermostat was in celcius and that's why the hashbrowns cooked so quickly...

After work on Friday Stella asked us to stick around for a few minutes because she was going to "offer us some cell phone" so we did, as we realized earlier this week having a phone can come in handy sometimes. It took us over 24 hours to figure out how to turn our phone on (Chris showed us- you hold down the red button). I was playing with it at Jo's last night and I was pretty impressed- it's in english, it's small, it has an mp3 player, camera and games... but then our Korean friend Jamie stomped on our dreams and told us it's an "ajumma phone"... which means it's an uncool, old lady phone. She said her Mom has the same phone. Koreans definately have nice cell phones, but ajumma phone or not, at least now I can stare hypnotically into my cell for hours on the subway like the Koreans. When in Rome...

If you'd like to come rob us, then here's where we live:

I thought some of you might like to see our 'hood on Google Earth. Click on this link and then choose "view in google earth". We're about 12,000 km to yer left.

Latitude: 37°15'34.84"N
Longitude: 127° 2'2.32"E

UPDATE: I fixed the link. Sorry!

Grand Tour

This is the 10 cent tour of our apartment aka white box in the sky...

Nothing's On

Our last day... goodbye Melrose Place

This our last day at Seoul English Village! We move to Suwon tomorrow. I met all the Suwon teachers yesterday and had a few of them over to our place while they were observing classes in Seoul. They're all nice and there's even one girl from Nova Scotia. Small world!

However, we saw a sample schedule for our new school and it's the suck. Teaching 7 classes a day, 5 days a week! We teach 3 or 4 a day here, some days we only teach one1. AND all of the classes are different. I'll be teaching 20 different subjects! I noticed that one of the classes scheduled for me to teach is DANCE and I plan to raise old hell over that. It's not happening. Here we teach the same two classes all week, which allows you to get comfortable (and good) at your class. Also, in Seoul our lunch break is an hour and a half, in Suwon it's an hour. In Seoul our apartment is big, in Suwon it will be small. Plus, I hear the school still has a lot of work to be done and the other teachers haven't even been allowed to see it yet. Needless to say, we are approaching this all very hesitantly. I'm truly looking forward to doing more work, paying utilities and living in a smaller apartment for the same pay (**sarcasm**)

On the bright side we get free cable! And like I said the other teachers are cool. And we might not have to teach for a few weeks until it opens. So it will be OK at first but, umm.... I can see the big picture and I'm scared!

We're going to miss everyone but mostly all of the SEV gossip. Like my post title suggests, this place is a bit like Melrose Place. It's kind of a soap opera because everyone lives together. Some people are dating, some people are fighting with other teachers, there are cliques... it was definately an interesting group!

Our internet access is also up in the air, but be sure that when the dust is settled we will start posting again! It's Friday night so you know there's pizza, beer and cards at our place tonight...

Update: We'll have our internet Monday morning!

How Dorks Watch TV

Our TV here only gets about 12 channels and only two are English. Well... one is English (it's the Armed Forces Network, for the troops stationed here) and the other is music videos that are sometimes English. Needless to say our TV hasn't been on in weeks and we've only watched two or three times since arriving. However, we haven't missed an episode of any favorites from home thanks to Utorrent and TVU.

I use Utorrent the most. It's how I download most regular series TV. Shows like Survivor, Next Top Model, Lost, Heroes, Amazing Race, Simpsons, Days of our Lives, Oprah, The Biggest Loser are all usually available 6-12 hours after they air at home. It usually takes 3 hours or so to download an hour long show but you just leave it running during the day and have something to watch at night. I download a bunch at once so there's always something to watch!

This TVU program is cool too. It has a bunch of TV channels streaming live, so you can watch pretty much anything you want as it's happening. My only problem with TVU has nothing to do with the program, and everything to do with my time zone. All of the shows are a good 10 hours behind. But it's all good. We use it for our fix of CNN mostly but sometimes we catch The Price is Right or Regis and Kelly at 1am.

AND we discovered Skype a few weeks ago which lets us use our computer as a phone for 2 cents a minute! When we move back home we're not getting cable or a phone! Why would you??? It's freeeeeee on the computer. If anything ever happened to lappy (our laptop) he would be replaced the same day, I swear.