Moving in

We have moved in and our location and accomodations are far superior to anything we had imagined. The coordinators had been telling us horror stories about tiny, cramped, infested apartments stuck either in the middle of nowhere or smothered in the smog of the city. While these conditions may be true for some poor souls, Kitty and I lucked out!



We have two giant rooms totalling more personal living space than i think i ever had in college. We live between the sea and the largest mountain in Shenzhen (Which we plan to hike on the upcoming 3 day weekend). Right next door is the de-commissioned soviet battleship "The Minsk," which has been turned into a sort of soviet theme park dubbed "Minsk World!" The beach is also 5 minutes away.

One of the coordinators used to live in Kitty's room and left her tons of teaching material. We got brand new furniture, beds, cooking utensils, and personal water coolers, and our crappy old chinese XP computers are supposedly going to be replaced very soon.
Flowers are super cheap here and people have been giving us tons of roses and various other flowers that smell good but i don't know what they are called (Kitty says they are lilies and carnations). The only problem is that sooner or later all of these flowers in the rooms are going to start smelling much the opposite.

Some things started letting us down, apartmentwise; however, and i went through a streak one day where everything i touched just instantly fell apart. Starting with the wall-mounted soap tray which gave up on life when i set the soap on top, to the desk chair that suicided (the second chair this trip to do so), and finally with the computer table whose sides fell off like a mummy on a roller coaster.

You can't beat the view however: From our room you can see right across the water to hong kong! I would swim it, if it wasn't horribly illegal and filled with death patrol boats.

We have been studying mandarin tapes everynight on the dockside, and have been freaking out passers-by repeating, "Would you like a little something to eat" over and over again. Little kids try to talk to us at our school sometimes, but the interchanges don't always go so well. These kids at our apartment said "Hello!" very cheerfully, but when we asked "How are you?" we only got blank stares. Then Andy took a picture:

Here's the playground at our school. It seems kinda lousy, but the kids enjoy it somehow.
Here's some "super cool" candy - this name should resonate with anyone who watches UCB:

And a bonus picture of Andy at karaoke with some weird dude who decided to break out his saxophone. He was actually pretty awesome.