Integration Lesson #1: Don't let strangers into your house

You'd think we'd know better by now about the mess you can get into when letting a stranger move in with you. But we are stupid, and when someone tells us they have a 12 week old kitten they cannot handle, we just say "Bring 'em on".

This morning, after another night of being kept awake by Mister Bojangles' singing, we noticed he had found an even better spot for our fourth bathroom -- on top of the Ektorp.

Thank you, Mr. Bojangles!

We stripped the Ektorp which fortunately has washable covers. We also washed the pillows, which will probably take ages to dry, so Ellen and Christiaan will have to join us on the floor when they visit this week. Perhaps it will not smell of cat excretions once it is dry...



We had expected we would have to go back to square one in our taming efforts, but surprisingly, Mr. Bojangles seems to have forgiven us for stripping his hiding place of its covers and then making lots of noise with the vacuum cleaner.

This evening, he even let me pet him. And he purred! Of course, all of this happened while he was hiding under the sofa, and I was doing my cat whisperer act. He seems to severely regret letting himself go like that, though, and has been hissing at me ever since.

Still, it is progress. Maybe...

Team Franke scores!!! China still way ahead...

We are back on the internetz!

We have been suffering from slow connectivity for a while, and recently it became so bad that A had no connectivity at all, and F had to renew his IP every 5 minutes or so. We were worried that the Great Firewall bastards were onto the fact that we almost exclusively visit the interwebz that are on the other side of their leaky wall, and that maybe this was part of a targeted campaign.

Yes, we suffer from delusions of greatness and paranoia.

The China Unicom people were not very helpful (how could we expect anything else) and told us we did not have a problem. When that did not work, they told us it was our problem, not their problem.

Somehow, we still convinced them to send someone over with a new modem/router (our third one in just 6 months -- hurray for quality). And lo and behold, the internetz opened its jade gate for us!

Intoxicated by this unexpected success, F called the water workers for the 100th time in the past fortnight. This morning, they had concluded there was no problem -- they arrived after we had ran the water for 30 minutes (this turns out to be sufficient to get it to turn hot), and since nobody else complained in the last two days, it was clear that we were confused and there was no problem.
This afternoon, the worker turned on the tap, and after waiting 30 seconds, the water turned lukewarm. "可以" was his reponse (meaning "it is OK"). Right. Who doesn't love showers that are colder than your own pee.
Then the worker found the problem, after disappearing for 30 minutes: who can expect hot water at this hour of the day?! We must have been confused.

To be continued...

Also, we ate a hamburger.

Too excited

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Sorry, I seem to be getting a bit too excited about our upcoming move and have wasted the past 10 minutes to get an aerial view of our old and new apartments.
The old one is (B) and the new one is (A). Google seems to think there is a straight line road connecting the two, but unfortunately that is not the case.

Although the 文城杰座 (B) looks more interesting and less communist from up above, we are hoping (fingers crossed) that 逸成东苑 (A) will not have seas of urine (ok, a sea of pee) in the basement. The stench has spread to the elevator (probably using our shoe soles), and although some of the urine has evaporated, nothing has been done by the building management. Apparently we are being weird and uptight thinking this is maybe a tiny bit unacceptable.

Sea of Urine --- the movie

Today we went to pay for our new apartment: 3 months of rent plus 1 month of rent as deposit. This is what (almost) 3 months of rent looks like:

Then we celebrated our new apartment again (as well as the fact that this is the 500th blogpost!), this time with...

... some nice roast duck.

Then finally, we made this little movie walking from our bikes to the elevator. It almost seems like a sweet (but very stinky) memory already...

New and old (and another "oh-my-god!")

Great news for all of us: we found a new apartment today! We had kind of given up on it, and decided today would be our last try at apartment hunting. So far, we had seen many apartments that were either filled with junk and mold, or had lots of missing furniture, missing tiles and wires without lamps sticking out of the walls and which, most importantly, never failed to be disgusting.
And then we saw this beautiful new place that no disgusting people have lived in yet (it has been completely refurbished), which has a bathtub (yay!), open kitchen (yay!) and non-rectangular-box-like overall shape (yay!). The good news for all of you is that it has a reasonably sized guestroom with a separate bathroom. So come visit y'all!

We went into town to celebrate the good news. Our rent is going to increase by 40%, but we nonetheless splurged on cocktails and French food, which Frans thought was so-so and Anke liked quite a bit.



Upon arriving back home, we found that our building had immediately struck back to punish us for being disloyal and moving away.

We always park our bicycles in the basement, and some of you may have heard us complain in the past about the fact that some of the basement-dwellers seem to have a hard time finding the restrooms and choose to use the stairway (right next to the elevator) instead. Yeah, we know, it is horrible that people have to live in our basement, with 4 people to a room without windows or fresh air. But that does not stop us from hating the smell of their urine.

Anyways, today upon arriving home, we found a sea of urine blocking the way to the elevators. Normally, we only smell the urine and don't see it, so this was quite a surpise for us. The smell also easily surpassed anything we had known before. We bravely jumped over the sea of urine, went upstairs and then your intrepid reporter went back down again armed with a face mask and camera -- I would not want you to think we are overreacting or anything. So here it is. Too bad (or lucky for y'all) they have not yet invented cameras to record smells.