our new apartment

Greetings and welcome to my first post from Nanjing as an actual resident. We ended up staying an extra night in the hotel due to the lack of a mattress and sofa, but we checked out of the hotel this morning, got our mattress delivered from IKEA this afternoon, and here we are. It will take a while for this to feel like home, but having gotten our internet setup mostly figured out, which allows for access to blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Sirius satellite streaming, Netflix, Hulu and more, we feel like we have one major and REALLY important thing out of the way.

Moving is always stressful, and moving to a different country naturally just exacerbates the problem. Really, you could look at moving yourself and your spouse to a different country as "How to Ruin Your Marriage in a Few Simple Steps", with the steps being:

1. Accept job offer.
2. Start packing things up.
3. "Have fun"

The beginning of the week was largely spent packing up, cleaning, and taking care of last minute things like haircuts, phone and cable service, accounts, etc. Not a lot of fun.

We stayed in a hotel on Tuesday night so that Becca could get all the towels and bedding into the laundry Tuesday and not have to worry about anything before we flew out on Wednesday. We didn't get to the hotel until late, and we were pretty stressed out when we woke up Wednesday morning and found a few inches of snow on the ground. Not only that, but we had to go back to our place in the worst of the snowstorm in order to finish closing it down. Fortunately, that all went fairly smoothly and we experienced no delays with our flight from MSP, or in any other place for that matter. Our flights weren't exactly pleasant, though. We were not permitted to fly business class this time around, so spending ~20 hours in cramped seating was painful, to say the least. At least I was able to get us into the first class lounge in LAX and then in Guangzhou. Getting some free snacks and wifi helped to soften the blow.

We arrived in Nanjing on Friday morning and were taken directly to our hotel. We put our stuff down, took showers, and then met our realtor so that we could go to the bank, get our deposit/rent money, and then go to the lease signing. When we got to the bank, we were horrified to find that none of the money we wired to our Chinese accounts had arrived. Long story short, we ended up visiting three different banks and using every debit and credit card at our disposal to get at least something to take to the signing. We ended up about $3000 short, but our landlord was fortunately very forgiving and told us they would take what we had and then give us another week to come up with the rest of the money before charging us any late fees.

After a couple hours doing the signing and walk-through at the apartment, we got a quick dinner of potstickers, shrimp dumplings, fried noodles and stir-fried vegetables at a restaurant in the mall that's in between our building and the Westin Hotel, and then went to IKEA to get a sofa, mattress and other stuff for home. Having slept very poorly on the plane and then being stressed out by the banking situation, it was a pretty rough evening. I almost fell asleep while walking around in the store--no joke--and felt pretty miserable by the time we were done. I don't remember if it was on the way to the store or after we finished, but I fell asleep in the van and started snoring so loudly that I jerked myself awake, which gave everyone in the van a good laugh.

We were up late that night trying to make phone calls to our bank in the US to figure out what happened to our money, and then we woke up around 3:30 to make more phone calls and deal with more stuff. Another recipe for a fun day, which Saturday turned out to be. Our bad luck continued in the morning, as our bank turned out to be one of the few we saw that was closed that day. Then, we tried to go to a Five Star (this is where I'll be working) to buy some electronic-oriented stuff, but the location we found was actually the office, not a store. Bummer. Then we found an actual store location, but the only part that was open was the bottom floor, where phones and computers were sold. Major bummer, since that's not the stuff we needed. So, we bagged that idea and headed for Carrefour, a French hypermart chain, to get a bunch of stuff. We then visited Times (a little shop that carries tons of American products), Walmart and IKEA again. We managed to get most of what we needed, but we still have a pretty long list of stuff that we need just the same. The overall experience was a bit crazy--the people were out in force, particularly in Walmart--but things would have been a lot worse had our realtor not accompanied us to help us figure things out. I can communicate OK for some things, but many things I just don't know or am not familiar with, so having the help made a huge difference. I mean, who woulda thought that you need to have your apples weighed and tagged before you go to checkout? Or that most places--even foreign-owned chains like Walmart and Carrefour--don't accept foreign credit cards? Or that finding a fan this time of year is completely impossible?

By the end of Saturday, we were pretty beat, so we took a nap around 6pm. Bad idea--jet lagged and the stress and pain of the week caught up with us, and we ended up sleeping until midnight. When we woke up, we decided to head over to the apartment and start setting things up. Here are some initial views of our place:





You can't tell much from the photo, and the place certainly isn't that big (keep in mind that I shot the photos with a wide angle lens), but I'm generally very happy with it and I think we will like living here a lot. I'll feel a lot better when our sofa arrives and is set up--one always needs a good place to sit--but we're doing pretty well. Anyway, we stayed until about 4:30am, and then went back to the hotel and got some more sleep.

We met some of my colleagues for breakfast this morning, then took care of more things on our to-do list. I waited at the apartment for the IKEA guys to deliver our stuff, and then we went back to the ATM, the Westin to check out, and then we got our gym membership at the Westin taken care of. As is always wise in China, I asked for a discount on the membership, and we ended up getting it for 30% less than we thought we would. This was a nice bonus and gave us a much-needed morale boost.

We've spent the rest of the day setting things up and taking care of business around the house. We were having trouble with the internet and needed help with a few other things, so the landlord came back a few hours ago and helped us fix things. I still can't use my corporate VPN, but as I mentioned in the beginning of this entry, we have personal stuff all squared away, which is awesome.

Here are some photos from our window that I took this afternoon:







You can see Xuanwu Lake in the second photo. It doesn't look like much now, but everyone says it's really pretty in the spring. I hope that will be true. Regardless, we're on the 14th floor of a high rise and I'm enjoying having a view from above again.

I'm really feeling the jet lag right now, so that's it for now.