Back from Malaysia...

We made it back from our short trip to Malaysia last night, and yes we were thoroughly exhausted from hanging out with our adopted family followed by sightseeing in Maleka.

When we walked in last night the girl downstairs talked to us about the repair issues that we still need to be completed, and Tina was able to understand that someone would come up today. So today Tina had the fun of dealing with maintenance workers as they looked at the damaged clothes hanger and our toilet. They decided once again that we needed a new clothes hanger and then they took apart our toilet for repairs. "Can't be fixed" was their analysis and off they went with the insides of our toilet.

So when I arrived home Tina asked me to call and see if maybe I could convince them to bring back the inner workings of our toilet so that we could use it tonight if we needed. Calling the girl and her answer was a simple "Use a bucket, we will be back sometime tomorrow afternoon." Ah, yes - how simple.

Eventually I convinced her to call and get it returned tonight, and apparently the guy decided that he didn't need the parts to purchase a new one and within 15 minutes they were at our door to return our toilet to the somewhat-working condition that it has been in for the last 3 months. Except that it looks like someone decided that they could fix that he took and now the seal won't drop after flushing unless you take the whole thing out of the toilet and manually pull it down.

Such fun, we will have to see what tomorrow brings...

As for Malaysia - we have well over 3,000 photos and lots to tell. We will start posting those stories tomorrow once we get a little better organized from that trip.

Simple Chores

While we aren't home owners like Mike & Heather, dealing with all of the fun that they're having, we still occasionally have to do some standard housekeeping. Tina will disagree and say it's a lot of housekeeping since she spends a lot of time keeping the place clean, or at least that's what she tells me. But last night as we were pulling out some frozen sauce to heat up for a lazy spaghetti dinner we finally had to break down and tackle the chore of...
... of defrosting the freezer. It had gotten to the point where we couldn't open three of the five drawers and something had to be done. Yep, a fun and productive Friday night for us.

Damage Report

Well, another set of guests have come and gone and Tina's luxury travel services are starting to show signs of wear.... Actually that''s not fully true, Barb and Nancy did enjoy their time (or so they told us) and we were able to take advantage of them coming to get Tina back up to Beijing for some sightseeing and I tagged along with them to see the canals of Tongli and the warriors in Xi'an.

But our apartment took a hit with these guests, as well as the loss of Tina's much loved new cellphone. Tina get's a little harried trying to ensure that everyone is having a great time, and while in Shanghai at the knock-off market she was paying more attention to helping the girls with their haggling for pricing and someone did the accidental bump and pulled her phone right out of her pocket. I'll give it to Tina though, she got over the loss fairly quickly (I'd have been pissed for 2-3 weeks) and by day two sans phone she no longer get upset when I'd kid her about it.

As for the apartment, I don't even know where to begin. Nancy fell when out on the balcony doing laundry and used our bucket and dust bin to cushion her fall. Tina immediately threw the dustbin out, but the broken bucket is still out there as a silent reminder.
The balcony and Nancy did not get along, as she also managed to break our 70 RMB (10USD) fold up chair while we sat out there one evening enjoying some wine and music. Yesterday we also noticed a new dent in the balcony railing, you can kind of see in in the photo -
So, we aren't really sure what Nancy did, but in retrospect we think that a dented railing and some broken items are better then if the railing had given out and our friend took the quick way down 20 floors....

But all of that was Nancy, and we think that she was just trying to catch up with the damage that Barb inflicted on the apartment on night one. As she wrote in her first post, we learnt a little about how toilets are plumbed in over here.
Our small bathroom before guests and then after -
Yep, we are down one bathroom. The toilet was just caulked to the floor so when a jet-lagged Barb bumped into it on their first night here, a little harder then the toilet expected, the toilet just slid back and bumped the corer of the wall and shattered.

Four people for a full 8 days with only one bathroom does get a bit tough. We will have the toilet repaired before our next guests arrive in the latter part of May.

Barb and Nancy will be getting invoices from Tina's Travel for repairs.

Chinese Living...

Not that long ago one of the older apartment buildings that I go by on the way to work was suddenly empty - all of the tenants moved out somewhere, presumably to some of the newer better housing that is being built all around us. So Tina and I, being who we are, decided that we would wander over to the old building and get a few photos...
The front of the building, almost all of the windows had been removed. Most of these type of complexes have a storefront on the ground floor with a family living behind the store and then more apartments on the upper floors, when we were there there were people going around inside scavenging through the remaining items so of course Tina and I decided to explore a little and go inside.
Someones old main living area, Tina is at the storefront at the road then there is a small hallway that runs the length of the building and then the living area and a smaller room of the back of that for the bedroom. The first floors appear to have had their kitchens stuffed in the back of the house, about a quarter of the size of our tiny kitchen. The upper floors had the kitchen in the front, across the hall from the apartment - above where the shop was located on the ground floor.
Above you can see where someone has ripped the wiring out of the wall, there was still furniture, dishes, pictures, and all sorts of items laying around but people we taking all of the items that they would be able to sell of for recycling.

The rooms weren't that small, but it was hard to imagine a whole family living in what appeared to be two room apartments. It may have been fine for a couple and their one child, but quite often one set of the parents moves in to help with raising their child. That would get a bit cramped.
The other item that we thought would be tough was that these apartments all shared community bathrooms and washing sinks. In the stairwells on both ends of the building there were three tiny little bathroom/shower stalls.

There are still a lot of these old apartment buildings in Xiamen, but they are slowly tearing them down and moving the residents into the newer apartment complexes like the ones that Tina and I live in. We aren't sure how the government compensates or moves people, but the tenants of this old building must really love it when they move into a new place - we presume that now they will at least have their own bathroom...

Finally, progress....

Well at least some progress in our little corner of the world...

I'm sure some of you may remember how we were amazed when we first moved into our apartment that the building was probably around 60-70% empty, and that most of the units we still under construction. There was a lot of work going on, and slowly but surely units were being completed and people were moving in.

Apparently last weekend we crossed some sort of work completed threshold, because when we went out all of our elevators looked like this:

That's a standard elevator with wood up covering the walls so that people can move in without damaging anything. We had presumed that we would never see this protection come down, but when we returned home the other day we found this:
An almost new looking elevator. Wow, it's like living in a whole new building.

Of course, the one construction elevator is still set up to carry bricks, but 2 out of 3 is definite progress. On a side note, whomever owns the unit directly across from us has decided that now would be the best time for them to start working on their unit.

This photo is from our front door, you can see the mats that they've put down to try and catch all the dirt. They aren't helping.