Adventures By Design

Ok, so we lasted only a week with our “Month of Blogging”, but it isn’t our fault! For the past couple days we have been busy moving to our new apartment, and we just got our internet back up.

Our old apartment was too cold in the winter, especially for a little one. We didn’t particularly want to move, but our landlady refused to upgrade the heater, so we felt we didn’t have much choice. We found a great apartment that our friend Emma was living in (she’s now moved to Bali). Emma had spent a lot of effort personalizing the apartment, and we saw the potential that it has. Although the location isn’t a three minute stroll from Mark and Lyndal’s apartment, it is a three minute stroll to Ryan and Maggie’s (and their dog Button). It’s further from some shopping areas, but more central and closer to many restaurants and coffee shops (i.e. Starbucks), and Jin Ji Hu (Jin Ji Lake). We think the location will be nicer for Gin next year when she can go for a walk with the stroller (er, and baby).

Emma had lived here for four years, and not surprisingly, the place needs to be painted. Further, in the process of making her home so beautiful, she added loads of hooks to the walls to hang photos and stuff. On Friday evening (after our last day of school), we came to Emma’s house to do a walk-through and sign the paperwork to take over the apartment. We saw Emma as she was leaving and she warned us that the landlord was being quite strict with demanding money to fix the walls, something we would normally call “wear and tear”. Originally, he requested RMB2000 (CAD $340) per wall! She balked, counter-offered, and all parties finally agreed to a reasonable RMB500 (CAD $85) total, for the entire apartment. Once they had that all settled Emma left and it was our turn to negotiate.

Our school employs an agency to help the teachers with our housing needs. The agents help us deal with bills and repairs as well as being a go-between with landlords. Although ostensibly these agents are hired to represent us and our interests, their committment to this ideal varies considerably. When we arrived at the apartment there was a man from the agency there that we had never met before.  He didn’t bother to introduce himself and seemed eager to get the process over with as soon as possible. He asked about a couple of pieces of furniture that the landlord could supply but that Emma hadn’t wanted, and then started making motions to simply sign the paperwork and finish up. At this point we asked about when and how the landlord planned to fix the walls (remember, Emma paid for repairs) and he looked exceptionally surprised.  What did we mean, ‘fix the walls’?  As far as the agent was concerned we had already agreed to move in and had thus forfeited our right to demand any changes or repairs to the apartment.

In our North American worldview, when someone lives in an apartment for four years, the landlord is obliged to paint and fix the place up a little for new tenants. Apparently this is not the Chinese worldview (or at least not this guy’s worldview) and we saw this could be a thorny face-saving issue. We started trying to look for compromises that would fix the major problems with the apartment but wouldn’t be too demanding for the landlord.  At this point we walked away from the agent and landlord and went to look around the apartment again more carefully. While we were gone the agent guy apparently called two other agents to come over because suddenly Ivy and Jane were there. These are the two agents that we deal with most of the time. They know us and they seem to understand the North American worldview somewhat. They immediately started looking for ways to get us what we wanted, not just a compromise. Jane pointed out the cracks in the paint in several rooms, and Ivy explained to the landlord how crappy it would look if they painted a room or two but not the whole apartment. In less than five minutes the landlord had agreed that of course the apartment needed to be painted and that they would have it done while we were away in Canada.

In retrospect, we realized that the male agent had never even asked the landlord about painting. He simply decided that since we hadn’t asked before that the landlord wouldn’t do it now.  Way to represent our interests, buddy!

So two days later on Sunday morning we moved all our stuff in (on a side note it’s amazing how much stuff we’ve managed to accumulate in one year!). However, since the apartment will be painted when we’re gone this summer we can’t really unpack. We’re supposed to leave our stuff packed up and try to stash it all in the bathroom (tiled, doesn’t need to be painted) so that it’s out of the way for the workers. Uh, yeah… we’ll see about fitting it all in there but we don’t think it’s going to happen. Now we’re off to finish cleaning our old apartment (okay, really we’re going to go check on the ayi/maid cleaning our old apartment) and then we sign the paperwork giving it up this afternoon.  Hopefully they don’t try to charge us RMB 2000 per wall!