Bold Move

The old adage that the only constant thing is change proved to be true for us yet again. With the end of the lunar year, our time in the southern capital also faded away. Heavy hearted, we cleaned up as well as we knew how and packed our suitcases ready to go on another journey. We couldn't leave without one more family dinner with Jonny and Amy. Fortunately for us Amy found a delicious restaurant and we were able to enjoy a wonderful meal together and excellent conversation before we headed out.

Our train was to set sail out of Nanjing at about 10:30 PM and arrive in Beijing at 7:30 the following morning. Not wanting to waste any of our time left in Nanjing (or our time looking for housing in Beijing) on train travel, we decided to use the unproductive sleeping time to travel. As good students on a budget do, we bought the cheapest train tickets that we could find (and that didn't involve taking a 40 hour pre-WWI train to Beijing): second class seats on a medium-fast train.

What I didn't know was that, since we traveled right before Chinese New Year was about to start, we were traveling during the highest high season of Chinese domestic train travel and seating arrangements in trains were different than usual. Our second class seats were not "seats" as one usually pictures them and as we had seen them previously. The train company had decided that all these sleeper cars were taking up too much space and that one could just use sleeper cars as seats. After all, sitting on a bed is not unheard of, is it! Thus there we were, sitting on the beds in a crammed sleeper car. There were two more guys who were traveling together, so they also had to share a bed to sit on, the other two people in the car were traveling alone and thus were blessed with the luxury to actually have their own bed. Jenn and I tried a hybrid version of sitting and lying on the beds comfortable enough to sleep. The only result was a massive headache and pain in the neck from lying in positions that people are not supposed to be in.

With the skies still dark, we arrived in Beijing. The next hours are a blur to me. I remember getting off the train, trying our best to haul our luggage around with us as we searched for a subway connection to our intermediate place of residence. Beijing does have as many people as they say. With a population exceeding 20 million, Beijing dwarfs New-York-sized Nanjing. I can honestly say that, in comparison to Beijing, Nanjing with 8 million inhabitants feels not unlike my home town in Germany with 12,000 inhabitants.
After we had set up home base at the apartment of the branch president of our Beijing branch, we immediately set out to find ourselves an apartment. We had found an apartment in Nanjing in less than 3 days, so we were quite optimistic.
A future colleague of mine, named Hou Bo, came to our apartment to pick us up and show us some prospective living arrangements. He had a friend in the realtor business and we had two apartments lined up to look at.

We quickly learned that things are different in the North than in the South. First of all, Beijing is gigantuous and going from place to place takes an eternity. While we got to look at many different apartments in only one complex in Nanjing, we had to travel far and wide to get from one prospective apartment to the next. Second, people were not lying to me when they said that Beijing is more expensive than Nanjing, especially in the housing market. With China's boom over recent years, Beijing is up and coming and everyone wants to cut themselves a slice of the communist cake of commercial opportunity that is Beijing. Apartments much smaller and dirtier and with less amenities than the ones we looked at in Nanjing were even more expensive. Our search brought us all over town and in contact with all kinds of realtors and landlords. At one point both Jenn and I were carried on the back of a scooter by the realtor and her sidekick to see an apartment. 

It turns out that not many people in Beijing want to rent their apartment out for only 4 months, most want at least a year. It was a tough search. After staying with our branch president for almost two weeks, we moved into a nice apartment just as the Chinese New Year celebrations were about to start. This apartment is being rented out by an American who needed someone to take his lease over for the month of February. We gladly volunteered!
It is a nice apartment and we feel well here, but it will not last much longer. Another week and the lease is up and were are again stranded on the streets. The plan is to move into an apartment that is owned by my aforementioned colleague, Hou Bo. The problem there is just that the current inhabitants have not vacated yet and it is still not sure when we can actually move an and, more important, if we'll have a fridge or washing machine once we move.

For now we are happily enjoying our current abode. We delight in the wonderful working gas stove, washing machine and microwave, hoping that those things will still be there in a week from now.