Three Apartment Complexes Saturday

Saturday, July 23rd was my father's birthday.  He would have been 90 if he was still with us.  

This Saturday was also a day where I got to be in three apartment complexs: my old, my current and my new.   (Note:  I also refer to these complexes as communities or neighborhoods or estates.)

I started the day in Xishan where my current-but-not-for-long 120 square meter apartment is located.  

From there I drove my son Tony to his baseball practice in an area which wasn't ever my 'hood.  From there it was back to Xishan where I prepared to go where I will start residing in August: Jiangyin.

Using the GPS on my phone, it took me over an hour to drive from the Xishan 'hood to the complex in Jiangyin where I should be living and soon will be living.  There were a lot of trucks on the route which was one of the three options the GPS offered.  I choose the route I was on because I didn't have to pay tolls.   The route was annoying to drive because of all the trucks and my having to always get out of the left turn lane, which was what the left lane I was driving in would sometimes turn into and sometimes not.  And because traffic was heavy with all the trucks, I had to be extra cautious when changing lanes.  

The drive did mark the first time I had been to Jiangyin since the Covid panic started.  Along the way, I saw some landmarks that  I recalled from my visits to Jiangyin, all those years ago, like the 80 story building erected in the countryside and the office building that contained the Jiangyin Canilx.  I also saw a lot of hills.  I like hilly terrain especially because I lived in the plains of North America for too many years.

I went to Jiangyin to look at apartments.  I looked at them in the neighborhood that is across from the school where I will be teaching.  I got to the estate early and so did a little driving in the area till the girls showing me the apartment arrived.  The terrain was more interesting than that I can see around My old Hui Shan 'hood as well as Xishan.  I saw hills that had to be twice as high as the ones I have hiked on in Xishan.  However, I didn't see much shopping and the road in front of the complex was like a freeway with lots of cars doing at least 60 kmh as they passed.  But the killer was that the three apartments I looked at were not at all adequate.  They were one bedroom apartments, about 50 square meters in size.  The bedrooms didn't have closets; the kitchens had no space for me to put any of my appliances in; and the living rooms had no room for my shelves.  And the topper was that the bathrooms didn't really have showers!  It was an bathroom arrangment I had never seen before in apartment hunting in China.  I had seen bathrooms where there was no stall, so that when you took a shower, the entire floor of the bathroom would get wet.  Till July 23rd , I thought this was the lamest, but the shower arrangment in the three apartments was something that I had never before could have imagined.   When I looked at the first bathroom, I had to ask where the shower was.  I was told that the one bedroom apartments didn't have showers in the bathrooms.  What the tiny bathrooms had were a toilet and a sink.  Between the toilet and the sink was a tap with a shower head attached to a hose.  There was a drain beside the toilet. The space between the toilet and the sink was barely enough to stand straight in.  If I took a shower in that space, I would get the toilet seat and the sink wet and they would be covered with shampoo.  The bathrooms, I had seen in Wuxi that horrified me because they had no stalls, at least had room to take a shower.  Anyway, there was no way I could rent any of these apartments.  I will have to look at larger apartments in that complex.

From Jiangyin, I decided to drive back to the Hui Shan District where the original Casa Kaulins, 89 square meters, is located.  I again didn't take a toll road.  I drove on a route called Liu Xiake, or something to that effect,  which I had driven many a time in years gone by.  I saw the Metro Line, which I had heard about many years ago, being built between Yanqiao and Jiangyin.  I can hardly wait for that line to be completed.

I drove back Hui Shan in order to take a familiar route back to the Xishan apartment where I will live for less than a fortnight.  I also wanted to see where my new apartment complex was in relation to my old one and how construction on that subway line was doing.