A space of my own

I love having my own space. Our apartments are in the middle of the main campus, so there is noise and busyness all around. On one side are the student dorms. Out my living room window I can look across at the balconies of the guys’ dorm and at all the laundry strung out to dry. Behind the apartments is a little canal which we affectionately (and appropriately) call “Stinky River.” It’s kind of greenish and smelly, like all the canals I’ve seen, but the idea of it is pleasant. Several weeping willows hang over the canal, and all along the side are rows and rows of rusting bikes. All bikes in China are in more or less advanced stages of rusting. Across the canal are off-campus neighborhood homes and apartments.

My apartment is on the second floor, on the farthest end of the building in the picture. My living room is quite big for one person. I have done my best to make it look homey, with my beautiful IKEA lamp and the rug I purchased the other day. At the far end of the room, by the windows, is a long pole on which I can hang laundry to dry. I have a very nice TV but not a lot to watch on it (that I can understand, anyway).


The kitchen runs off of the living room at the back of the apartment. I have a refrigerator, microwave, electric wok, and rice cooker. What more do you need in life? I love the big windows in the kitchen because I can look out and watch my neighbors in their back courtyard. The courtyard doubles as a kitchen/bathroom/laundry room/living room/storage room/garage, probably because it’s cooler than inside the house.

Back to my house, beside the kitchen is the bathroom, which is also where the washer is. (I have my own washer! This is way better than college.) I have a western style toilet and a shower. The shower is really a shower head on the wall and a drain in the floor, but I put up a shower curtain so the rest of the bathroom doesn’t get soaked. The plumbing is maybe not the best since bathroom tends to smell if anyone in the building flushes their toilet. For a while, the window was permanently stuck open, but I cleverly fixed it using a rubber band and a stick from a Popsicle maker.

My bedroom has a beautiful wood floor. I mean, it’s fake plastic wood, but it’s still beautiful. The concrete in the rest of the house is okay, it just doesn’t look clean no matter how many times you mop. The bedroom also has air conditioning, which can be blasted to the rest of the apartment. Mattresses in China are much harder than we are used to (when I was first my sides felt bruised from sleeping), but you get used to it quickly and I kind of prefer the hard. I also have a little office sort of a room, but right now it is serving as more of a team storage area, so I didn’t bother to take a picture. And that’s about all I have to say about that.