No Place Like Home

Writing from an internet cafe across the street from our new apartment. I’m surrounded by mostly young men smoking and playing video games while conversing loudly over the tops of their monitors.

It’s been a rough week.

Jeremy and I were planning on moving the first of the month. We discovered a cheaper, more comfortable apartment, so we found a new tenant to move in to our old place. We thought we had secured the new apartment with the current tenant, a young French woman, but as they informed us on January 30 (two days before move-in), the landlords felt they were under no obligation to rent to us. In fact, they were not so articulate as all that. They ran circles around us for about an hour — first ignoring us completely and then finally talking to us briefly, giving various explanations of why they were not ready to have us sign a lease. Very strange. The situation was quite mysterious, and after telling the story over and over I’m still not sure what happened. It was definitely a miscalculation on our part to communicate only with the current tenant, but we had every assurance from her that she had it worked out. Ah well. The bottom line is the landlords must have had their eye on bigger money and we had two days to find a new place to live.

Needless to say, we were angry and desperate. We went into overdrive calling friends and discussing the problem with our tutors and responding to every “for rent” ad we could find. To be honest, I totally lost track of time. A friend of a friend had an empty bedroom in an apartment with several foreigners. We considered moving in there temporarily and storing the lion’s share of our stuff at a friend’s. At least that way we could have a little time to look for a suitable apartment. It was really stressful and we cursed those bad landlords every step of the way! How could they just turn us away, knowing we wouldn’t have a place to live in less than 2 days? It’s greed. Landlords here have just discovered that they can rent to foreigners for crazy prices. Even old places like theirs.

In the end, we got very lucky. We were very fortunate that the guy who was moving into our old place was pretty laid back. When I called him to tell him the situation, he agreed to give us a few days to remove all of the boxes from the apartment. Then, miraculously, we found a very comfortable apartment nearby. Better than the place we were originally planning to move to. We signed the lease February 1st and began to move our stuff in. Oddly enough, on February 1st Kunming saw snow for the first time in 5 years. We don’t have a lot of stuff, so hiring someone to help us seemed silly, so we moved it all ourselves. In the snow, we carried our things up and then down the giant hill between the two apartments.

Well, that’s why I’m writing from an internet cafe. We still don’t have the internet up and running at the new home.

Sigh.

Our new apartment is great. Really. I was afraid we’d settle for something more expensive and less comfortable, but I’m actually quite pleased. For those of you planning on visiting, I should tell you it’s on the 7th floor. No elevator. That’s really the only vaguely invconvenient thing about the new place. It has a few more amenities than our old place: a big washing machine, a hot water heater, a microwave, and a little oven. It also has two desks, so Jeremy don’t have to share. We still need to pretty it up a bit, but it already feels like home.