Settling in

I finally feel like I'm kind of getting settled in. We have a beautiful apartment. It's brand new and in a brand new building in the very center of downtown Shenyang. One one side of our building is a pedestrian shopping road, just like Wang Fu Jing road in Beijing, with all my favorite stores plus some outlandish ones like Cartier and stuff. Everything is very close, and I really do like it.

My first impressions were really good. The walls, instead of being the white-washed plaster I've often seen in Chinese apartments, are nicely wallpapered. We have lovely showers and a huge bathtub. There are fire alarms, sprinklers, and even hoses out in the hall. This is not the case in every building here. The apartment itself has beautiful-but-not-gaudy furniture. I took a couple photos of our living room. On the right you can see a tiny bit of the large-screen TV (one of 4) that came in the apartment.

And this next one showcases my photographic specialty of backlighting, but it also shows a smidge of the dining room off to the right.

Isn't it fancy! I love the patterned chair, and the couches are firm but comfy. We're going to have them take the coffee table away to give Penny a carpeted space to play, and then it would be even better.

I would put pictures of the rest of the house, but our UAB shipment arrived (6 days after we did), and its contents are spewed all over in a semi-unpacked state. Plus, I just haven't gotten around to taking any pictures.

The living room gives you a good idea of what the whole house looks like, though, and it leads me to my next point: there is a lot we have to get used to about this place.

Honestly, I've lived in China 3 different times before this, each time for about a semester or 6 months. I thought it would be a piece of cake moving in here. But this time it was a little overwhelming wrapping my brain around the fact that I'm here for two whole years. I'm in charge of raising children and keeping them safe, clean, and healthy. I'm investing a lot more of myself in this place than I ever did as a student. And there are some things that I could overlook for a few months that would drive me nuts to deal with for 2 years.

The first thing that got to me after a day or two was the color. Our whole apartment is grey: the wallpaper, trim, doors, bedroom carpet, curtains, bathroom walls and floors, lampshades. Black and white photographs hang on the walls. I'm glad it's a neutral color, but I kind of wish it was a happier neutral color. I put up some flower stickers in Penny's room, a large lemon clock in the kitchen, and we have plans to put our gold-colored stuff in the living room. When the rest of our stuff comes, we'll get out all our bright stuff. Bit by bit we'll liven this place up.

We're making a trip to Ikea this evening, and that will help us solve some of our moving-in woes, including storage issues, making a baby nursery, and generally making this beautiful space a little more functional.

In my last post, I mentioned that we live in a construction site. Here are a few pictures. This first one shows our apartment's main front door on the right. Then I think there should be a street on the left, and then an intersection right in front of you if you were to walk forward in this picture. But it's all dug up and being constructed. They estimated being done today, but I estimate they're nowhere near being done.

There's dust and dirt everywhere, and when it rains, it doesn't wash off, but just turns to mud.

This next picture shows an aerial view of that same intersection, I think. Not only is the intersection itself dug up, but the whole street for several blocks in every direction. This means that while the grocery store is less than 100 yards away, I have to walk about a half a mile to get there. But there's a Walmart in the other direction, so I just go there for now.

I guess it's nice we'll be here for 2 years, because we may get to enjoy the finished product-- eventually.