My trip to Suzhou and the New Apartment.

Sunday was a long day full of annoying and sometimes interesting things.  The object of the day was to get a big closet moved from Suzhou to Wuxi and then have it installed in our master bedroom in our new apartment.  It got done but not without trouble.

The wife hired a driver and truck to take us to Suzhou.  In my mind's eye, I had imagined us taking in a freeway between Suzhou and Wuxi, but instead we seemed to have taken an ordinary road between the cities.  So, we drove through countryside villages and the trip was interminable.  Having been in Jiangsu for almost four years now, I have seen enough of never-ending villages and houses, and had enough of the depressing brownish/gray skies.  But on the interesting side, I did see a fire in an industrial park.  As we drove by, I saw people running out of the building that was engulfed and looking up at a fire on a second floor.  I also saw a dog get hit by a car.  This dog made the mistake of walking into traffic.  There was a fence median that prevented the dog from crossing and so it ran along the fence against traffic.  The sight of an oncoming car caused the dog to run into the center of the lane.  The car tried to swerve to avoid it but I then heard the dog yelp in pain and run three legged off the road.  One of its' hind legs was dangling: a sickening sight. 

In Suzhou, we went to an apartment complex where garages were being using for commercial and warehousing purposes.  Our closet was stored in one of them.  We also had to pick up  a worker to put the closet together.  The driver took a different way back.  He didn't know the way to go in Suzhou.  On the way back, he took us through the countryside of Wuxi which the wife and I had never seen before.  As we got close to the apartment, our driver was scared to be pulled over by the police saying his kind of truck was not allowed on this road.  It always amuses me when Wuxi drivers worry about following rules.

Once at the new apartment, we fed the driver and installer.  Other workers were there waiting to take the parts of the closet up to our third floor apartment.  As they did this, the wife and the driver had a big argument because the driver wanted more money.  He said the drive was further than he thought and that since I was a foreigner he thought I could afford to pay him more.  He couldn't deal with my wife's fury (not that I can either).

The installation of the closet seem to be going along smoothly.  But then it was time to install the closet's very top shelves.  Lifting them with the installer, we quickly realized that the entire closet unit was about a centimeter too tall for our bedroom.  We had a quandary on our hands.  The ideal thing to do would have been to take an inch of wood off the closet's base but none of the tools necessary were on hand.  There was also a suggestion to take out some wood flooring and sink the closet.  For a moment, the wife decided to use the two top shelves as TV stands in the living room and master bed rooms.  But she was not at all happy about this.  It looks today that we will have a German expert craftsman with tools by name of Andreas take some wood of the closet's base to lower the its' height. 

On the bright side, if you see Wuxi Jenny Apartment Update #13, we have an oven in the kitchen.

On the dark side, the floor in the master bedroom was scratched and the wife became very upset.  She will have to get used to scratches in the apartment once Tony starts roaming there.