Apartment hunting is no fun no matter what city in which you find yourself. The same monotony and long hours on your feet occur in Barcelona, Boston or Beijing. That’s precisely why Sean and I are currently resting our ragged dogs at a nice bookstore cafe, trying to recover to resume our quest for the perfect pad.
We’re perfectly allowed a break since we both put in long hours today. Plagued by jet lag I had thought I avoided, I barely slept last night, popping my eyes open for good at around 6AM. I had been to bed and awoken without Sean ever making it to the room! He stumbled in around 6:30 and we were just happy to finally be together. Since we both couldn’t sleep, we wandered into the hotel restaurant for a Chinese buffet breakfast. No scrambled eggs and pancakes here. Rather, we chowed down on steamed buns, fried cookies, cabbage and rice porridge. Good morning, China!
We drove into the city and ventured into our new school, the language university in Beijing. We already longed to spend time together, since we had been apart for most of the summer, so we knew we had to immediately initiate Operation Beijing Apartment Hunt when we were assigned to separate dorms.
In order to save money and headaches, we decided to move into the school assigned dorms offered as part of our scholarship. Other students had forewarned us that we’d get the most basic accommodations, but these were even more meager than we expected. And to top it off, we were assigned to separate buildings and given some unintelligible excuse as to why we couldn’t at least stay in the same building. What’s more, we’re on entirely opposite ends of the campus. My roommate seems very nice — a girl from Ghana in her third year at the university — but, sadly, I’m a bit old for the college dorm thing. Sean wasn’t down with his dorm either, we decided to try to nail down a place before the day is out.
So far, we’ve seen 4 places. The apartments are generally around $500-800 for a nice one or two bedroom. Most of the area is canvased with sprawling apartment complexes. When one agent led us down a hutong alleyway, i started to get excited, only to be disappointed by yet another grouping of 5 high rises soaring at the alley’s end. We’re still at it, though, and hopefully I’ll be typing from our new Beijing home soon!
