Life in Jinan: the apartment

Many people have asked me if I have already gotten a bit used to life in China, and my answer is often: I don’t know. I’ve hardly had the time to actually stand still and think about it. Even though it’s only for a year, I’ve emigrated to the other side of the world (sometimes I’m still surprised that I could just decide I wanted to go to China, and now here I am, like it was some sort of magic trick and didn’t take months of planning and arranging). If it’s possible to get used to that, it might not be to ever get used to a country as different and interesting and fast changing as China. I’m used to living in a country where you can cross the border by car within two or three hours, but here in Jinan, it almost takes two hours just to reach the train station on the other side of the city.

I must admit, it was definitely a strange idea that after my travels through Russia, the home I would arrive to was one I’d never been to before. The year before, the apartment was rented by three girls, all students from Leiden, following the same Master we did, who would return for their last semester in Holland as we left to start our year in Jinan. After spending more than two weeks in a train or a hostel, with just the space of a bed to call mine, it was such a relief and almost a luxury to have a complete apartment, and even my whole own bedroom. For me, it didn’t take that long at all to settle there. The first few days, we had to clean a bit, buy some more supplies (also mostly for cleaning), and enjoyed ourselves exploring the place that would be our home for the year, browsing through the stuff the girls

and former tenants had left behind. There was some weird stuff (like the five Winnie the Pooh floor mats I found in a closet), but I was more than glad with all the pencils, sketchbooks and other drawing supplies. In the kitchen we found a lot of beer cans and food ranging from Dutch pepernoten, candy and cookies to rice, tea and Chinese soysauces. The living room sports a couch that is not only huge but super comfy as well. Since you can’t drink the tap water in China (in the beginning I even thought it smelled like swimming pool water), we have one of those office water dispensers. Every once in a while, we have to call the ‘water guy’, to bring us a new water tank. He already knows us; quite often we’re not even halfway done telling our address (it’s quite a long address), and he already knows where to go.

The guys were very gracious to let me have the bedroom with its own bathroom, while they took the other two (smaller) bedrooms and shared the second bathroom (though my bedroom was also by far the most girly of the three). I remember realising after a few days that, until then, I had never even had my own bathroom before, let alone that it was on the same floor as my bedroom, and now all I had to take was three steps to get there. On top of that, I even had a double bed! Though the beds deserve a story as well: apparently Chinese people like their matrasses hard. In the hostels, I would not call the beds soft, but they were still okay. In our apartment, however, they seemed to be just a slate of wood with some blankets over it. It took some time to get used to, and especially those first days I sometimes forgot it wasn’t a good idea to let myself fall down on my plank of a bed. To think that a few hundred years ago, rich people in China rested their heads on pillows made of porcelain... so maybe I shouldn’t complain. Right now, I even think I would find the beds back in Holland too soft!

One other thing that made me love my room even more is my desk. I

just need a proper desk, preferably with drawers and lots of spaces to put my stuff away. The thing that was standing in my room when we arrived in Jinan, I wouldn’t even call it a desk, since it was just a wooden surface on four legs. And since one of the guys wanted to look for a better mattress (or just a mattress, since the beds of the guys didn’t even have these), we decided to go to one of Jinan’s second hand markets. We were unprepared for what we would see there. There was just so much stuff, and so much of it was old and dirty and practically garbage. Buildings full of furniture, sometimes piled up high, aisles of desks, tables and beds, but also fridges, televisions, freezers, airco’s, rows of bicycles and scooters, and lots of kitchen ware and other small stuff, stacked on wobbly racks. It’s a shame we didn’t take pictures. The people there thought it was quite amusing to see us westerners walking around. In that maze of rubbish, I managed to find a very cute, practically new desk. But we got to the second hand market by bicycle, so how would we get it home?

As it turned out, at the entrance of the market stood a number of men with some sort of Chinese style pick-up trucks, ready to take anyone and their bought goods to their house. One of these guys was willing to get a mattress, two desks, three bikes and five foreign students back to their apartments, and that for what amounted to just a few euros.

Even though the year isn’t even halfway through, I don’t think I would’ve ever chosen to live in the dormitories of the university over living in an apartment. The dormitory is cheaper of course (though I still pay less rent than I did for my room in Leiden), but the space you can call yours is very limited. When I tell my classmates that we have our own kitchen and bathrooms, they already make jealous noises, and that’s when they don’t even know how spacious it is. People say home is where the heart is, but I think in China you can also say, home is where the quiet is, because after the hustle and bustle of class, the canteen, the traffic and all the people on the streets, to be able to retreat to our own place and find some peace and quiet is something I can very much appreciate.