day 2 in beijing
had 包子，粥，油条 for breakfast at the same 成都小吃 shop as the first day. surprisingly their 油条 is nice! then off we went to our apartment. china ppl are really efficient! after juz one night, they got the house ready with all the tables and chairs, beds, and even the partition wall for the extra room in the living room was built. so we are all ready to move in after some cleaning up.
the thing abt the way ppl work here is that they are v efficient and nice before u pay them the rent. after tt, they keep dragging things and will only get it done after much reminders.. quite irritating sometimes. to make things worst, our apartment had alot of problems! the toilet bowls cannot be flushed, the tap was leaking, door knobs not working, cockroaches everywhere, light not working, sink leaking, heater unstable.... such a long list right.. so we spent the next 5 days solving all these problems, equipping the house and cleaning up. but till now, the heater problem is still not solved. the water heat is always unstable when bathing.. requires a great deal of skill to manipulate the water temp, if not u will either freeze or get scald to death.. but the agent keep insisting that this is not his problem so he cannot fix it or change a new one for us. sian! i hope we can survive winter.
so we went to visit the 方庄市场 near our place for the first time! so excited for the first time, but we are all so sick of the place now. we will visit the place at least once every 2 days.. till the point tt everybody there knows we are from spore! which is not a good thing bcoz they will quote us higher prices.. and our bargaining skills are so lousy. feel so cheated. sad.. but it sells everything under the world.. everything can be found there so it's still quite convenient for us.
it was clear blue sky that day and we thought that maybe beijing pollution is not so bad afterall.. but we were so wrong! tts maybe the rare few days where u get to see a clear blue sky.. most of the days are hazy and the amt of ppl smoking on the street are terrible. they smoke everywhere! in the restaurants, toilets, and they can even smoke when they are eating! getting so sick of the cigarette smell.
so we bought alot of stuffs from the market, including our bed sheets, shoe rack etc.. they seldom provide plastic bags here, so we had to bring our own shopping bags and carry all the things home. on the way home, we stopped at this pebble road and started taking pics of how "auntie" we looked. and guess what, the pebble road is now paved with tar! tt makes our photo so memorable...
we went to sign up for broadband and a house line too, but realised that the house line is too redundant, so gonna cancel it soon. do ur know whats broadband called in chinese?? it's 宽带! such a direct translation.. i think we can earn big bucks here if we are to correct all their chinese to english translation. tt day we cant stop laughing when we were buying meds at this pharmacy. the direct translation really cmi.
on our way back, we bought drinking water too. tap water in china are not drinkable. so we had to get those water dispenser that u see in offices. we consume about 1 big tub every 2 days, bcoz we use tt to cook too! feel too unsafe to use tap water.
then huangfang, eileen and yizhong went to carrefour to get more stuffs, while junie and i stayed at home to make the beds and clean up a little. the beds they provided were cui bcoz it's 超薄软垫. the 超薄 part is so true but the 软垫 part is totally deceiving. it's very hard but i think it's good for the spine.. i am used to it bcoz last time when we went back taiwan, we will juz sleep on the floor. i think it's still fine. but the rest cannot take it. lol. they bought an extra 床垫 but it's still as hard. and the tables provided by them are even more cui! it's looks like a pri sch study table. so small tt after placing a laptop, nothing much can be put on it. totally cannot be used for studying. the wardrobe is the cloth-covered kind! can only hang a few clothes and the metal structure keeps swaying. we had to assemble them and we became pros at it. lol. but at least the sofa, tv, washing machine and fridge they provided are alright. the sofa can be converted into a bed, but it's abit squeezy for 4 ppl to sit on.
whoots! they came back with 500rmb plus of things from carrefour! tts like more than S$100. we have been spending money like crazy for the first few wks bcoz of the amount of things we had to buy.. had cup noodles for dinner and guess what we did for post-dinner activity. that's right! cockroach killing.. we spent the next few hrs killing them and then gave up bcoz we were all coughing badly from the pesticide.
tt sums up the tiring day we had from all the shopping, cleaning and roaches-killing! more to come for the following few days...