Apartment Pictures - UPDATED

I apologize for the dreaded red X!

Actual pictures hopefully below...

NOTE: We cannot view the blog, only edit (thanks to The Republic). If something does not appear correctly, please let us know!


As promised... this is what our apartment looks like...


In the first picture, you will see the building from the outside. It is 24 stories. We live on the 3rd floor. A lot of the apartment buildings in our neighborhood are taller then ours. Including three enormous high rises that appear to have halted construction in the middle of the project.
UPDATE - Come to find out, the reason for the stoppage in the project was/is because the builder did not gain a "license." All the rooms were already sold!

When you walk in the door, the first door on the left is a storage room (which includes a professional looking ping pong table - yes, ping pong).

Second door on the left is the bathroom. Please notice the height of the shower head , about chest level. This is probably the only downside of the apartment. The bathroom is tiny and not very nice, at least to western standards. You can barely see on the left the free standing washing machine. It of course is completely in Chinese, so we have no idea how to work it. We anticipate our Ayi (sounds like I-E) will be doing all of our laundry. She is basically our cleaning lady that will come 3 times a week. She will also do dishes in addition to cleaning and laundry and the bargain basement price of less then $2/hour. We have no dryer, the are expensive so we bought a drying rack instead. We look at it as a way to be more environmentally conscience.

Bedrooms at the back of the apartment are both really nice and good size. The guest room also has a desk in it. Surprisingly adequate, at least to my expectations.

Alright, now the kitchen. It is like a elongated closet that smells like 10 day old Chinese food. We have scrubbed it, and plan on having the Ayi deep clean every crevice. We just cannot get used to the smell. Thank goodness the kitchen has a door to it and the restaurants in our area are abundant and inexpensive. We don't anticipate doing a lot of serious cooking.

Nadia is very happy that her Mom had the intuition that our apartment was going to have strange smells, we packed scented candles accordingly.

Despite both of our surprise to the generous size of the apartment, Nadia's second reaction was why the hell did we leave our newly remodeled house in the country sitting on a beautiful acre, with full mature trees, for an old apartment in the 10th most polluted city in the world? A trip to Ikea, a little Guitar Hero, and some deep scrubbing by the Ayi's have begun to ease the culture shock and make our apartment feel more like home.

More to come...