A Trip to Ikea

With every new home there's stuff to buy, so we were thrilled to learn that Beijing has Ikea.

Like most Ikeas, this one was packed. Here are some fun photos from our day, which show a few differences between shopping in an American Ikea and a Chinese one. Take a gander.

The approach to Ikea!

The Home Saga

Dear readers, this is a bit of a long post.

After our initial house-hunting trip we zeroed in on our favorite place: a two-bedroom, two-bath home that's about 1,200-square-feet. It came with a washer and dryer, dishwasher and a garbage disposal -- something we haven't had in years in NYC.

Nia loves her new view.

After a slew of back and forth with the fickle landlord -- at the last minute he raised the rent by about $80 a month because, well, I guess he can do that -- we got the place. We were super happy and our move in, while hectic, seemed okay. After more than two months of living in temporary housing we were thrilled to have a place to call home.

And then we showered.

"Oh That's Different" No. 2

It's been about a month since we came to Beijing and here are a few other interesting tidbits about this city of 20 million.

1. Communal toilet paper. Okay, you don't actually share your pieces of TP, but when you go into the bathroom, there's often only one toilet paper holder, typically near the sinks. (I learned this the hard way when I entered a stall and a little too late realize there wasn't any TP around. Okay, TMI.) Maybe it's too expensive to put toilet paper holders and rolls in each stall?

At least there's not a one-piece-per-person rule.

International House Hunters: China Edition

After living in a temporary residence for almost a month to get our bearings of Beijing, we were finally ready to start the apartment search.

Despite my knowledge of U.S. real estate, I knew next to nothing about Chinese real estate and it's a bit different. One of the first things we were told by our relocation specialist was that real estate agents flat out lie -- particularly on their websites about unit pricing, just to get you to give them a call -- and that landlords are more fickle than a two year old. One minute the landlord may decide to rent his space and the next he could decide he doesn't want to, but fail to tell anyone about it, leaving the current tenant to deal with surprise guests (more on that later).

The other major thing in Beijing is that the market is ridiculously expensive. Let me repeat; it's expensive and this is coming from a New Yorker, who knows a one-bedroom can easily cost $2,500.

We're looking for a two-bedroom, two-bath, semi-furnished apartment and the places we saw ranged from under 900 square feet to a colossal 2,000-plus-square-foot duplex. Most of the kitchens don't have dishwashers or disposals (same as NYC) and water jug systems (think of the Culligan man back in the 1980s coming to your home) are quite common. Many of the places have wood or wood composite floors, wallpapered walls, railroad kitchens and built-in closets. Most of them are in decent condition, though a bit outdated, and could definitely use a personal touch.

Can the couch be recovered, please?

A Trip to the Pharmacy

Being under the weather in a different country ain't fun.

Scott had a cold earlier this week and passed it along to me. I went looking for throat lozenges and couldn't find any in several different places, so I decided to go to a pharmacy. Now, pharmacies here aren't like CVS or Walgreens in the U.S. They only sell over-the-counter medicine (no magazines, cards, lotion, etc.) and unfortunately, almost everything -- save for the Cialis, of course -- was written in Chinese.

Thanks to China's push to become a more service-driven economy, I walked in and immediately was pounced on by two or three different employees. They started speaking quickly in Chinese and I asked them to slow down. In my only-8-day-of-lessons Mandarin, I said, "I want" and then pointed to my throat and made a coughing noise. This drummed up another minute or so of quick discussion among the workers, which ended with one woman finally saying the word for "to drink", so I assumed she was asking if I wanted cough syrup. I shook my head and said the word for eat, because that's the closest verb to "suck on" I knew. They nodded, pulled a $6 box of medicine out from a cabinet and sent me on my way.

When I got home, I sat down and Googled my purchase. Nope, not throat lozenges. Pills for tonsillitis. China pharmacy fail.

It was only when I went to the 7-Eleven for a jug of water that I noticed Ricola just sitting there next to the candy. If I didn't already love 7-Eleven for their slurpees, this would've won me over.

Beijing Rush Hour

Before coming to China, I read about snaring traffic in Beijing, and this past week I experienced it in its full glory.

During rush hour, which begins around 4:30 or 5 p.m., it took Scott and me nearly an hour by cab to go five miles to get home. In other cities, you inch along in a car, at least feeling some sense of progress. Not in Beijing. We sat for a good five or 10 minutes and not a single car moved. Our cab driver got so annoyed that he stepped out of the car and just stood in the street, staring ahead at the mass of tail lights, as did other drivers. There was honking for no reason except for the "I'm really frustrated and pissed off" reason and light cycles went from green to red with no movement. And then, just as quickly as cars had stopped, they started moving again. No accident, no construction, no explanation of anything.

Sans driver: bad traffic leads our cabbie to get out and stand in the street.

Dreaming in Chinglish

I've gone to one week of Mandarin classes so far and my brain feels like mush.

My teacher is wonderful, a young 20-something who is from northeast China and I have one-on-one classes with her every day for two hours and then she gives me homework each night. The intensity makes my brain hurt. Each sentence I think about saying I think in English, then ask myself what's the Chinese word and then have to figure out the sentence structure. It takes me a good minute to say, "I like to eat noodles."

A view from my Chinese textbook.

The other night, I dreamt in Chinglish -- I'm not sure if that means my brain is learning the language or just getting confused. I was dreaming about some meal and I found myself saying things in my dream like, "The soup hen chi and the pi jiu fai chen he," (meaning the soup is tasty and the beer is very good). It was the weirdest experience ever. Scott, who has been taking Mandarin for three months now, said he had a similar Chinglish dream experience when he started classes, too.