I have arrived! My Apartment

Ok, so I left at 8:30 am on Tuesday and arrived in China at 10 pm on Wednesday b/c of the time change situation and since I flew west across the pacific, I never had any darkness even though a whole day went by since we were basically outrunning the spin of the earth. I guess I didn't really fly but rode in an airplane, for as we sky divers say: "if riding in an airplane is flying, then riding in a boat must be swimming...get out of the vehicle and enjoy the thrill!" Anyway...so I get picked up in the airport by a couple of Chinese teachers, but I am deathly tired so that's all a blurr and they drop me off at my apartment, but they can't let me inside the apartment until this apartment worker arrives to check the meter for the water and electricity and walk through the apartment with me and see what's broken, at this point it's after local midnight time and I am about to fall over. So they finally all leave and when I wake up about 5 hours later when the sun rises and the jet lag kicks in, I get a good look at the place. Here's what I found:















Ok, so the interesting things to note here are that the shower is not separate from the toilet at all. Matter of fact, I could even be sitting on the toilet and be showering if I wanted to be particularly efficient. Hmm, now that I think about it, that would be like having an awesome bidet... It is annoying though b/c now I can't really pee in the shower anymore b/c I realize that all of the golden flow will be all over the floor...anyways...Once I took a shower, the whole bathroom including the toilet and sink was completely splattered with water which took about 4 hours to dry, there is a drain in the middle of the floor and there are big bright heat lamps on the ceiling but it still takes about 4 hours.

Speaking of lamps, take a look at my bed, yes those are blue mood lights built into the bed, and the light switch for the bedroom has options to be yellow-normal light, or blue-trippy mood light, or combined yellow and blue really weird light. But I think I got bruises from jumping on the bed the first time b/c it's about as hard as the box spring without the mattress in the U.S., I mean really, they could use this bed for those commercials that show that the red wine won't spill even if she jumps up and down, except that you cannot make any indentation into this bed unlike the Tempur-Pedic, well at least that's excellent for your back, my mom sleeps directly on the floor for the back benefits.

Here are a few random pics showing the views inside and out of my China apartment:









Tomorrow, I will post about my first shopping experience and my apparent Pied Piper like effect on everyone that sees me.

So it begins...

So this is it, the time has come, I have the visa in the passport and in T minus 8.5 hours I will be on the plane to the People's Republic of China (not to be confused with the Republic of China aka Taiwan, a separate country to some, a part of the PRC to others). I plan to post a bunch of pictures in the future on this blog, and given the rather public nature of this blog, and the possibly controversial nature of said photographs and various rants I may be prone to spewing on this blog, I would request that when posting comments, said commenters eschew the utilization of the legal name of this blogger and instead refer to same as Stormseeker, or Storm for short, or some snide nickname if the commenter so prefers.