I’ve made some observations about my new apartment that I think are worth noting and just drive me literally insane. Here they are:

The apartment building is situated alone, unlike most of the other buildings in my area, which are in huge complexes and apartment neighborhoods. It has over twenty floors and two elevators. The entrance to the lobby area (if you can call it that), is always piss poor dirty. There are constantly tons of flies everywhere, swarming, buzzing, doing what flies do: annoy the shit out of people. I am not the one to complain about a few measly flies but this is kind of ridiculous, especially considering the quality of the apartments in this building are all pretty high class. My last building, the lobby was pretty darn fancy, with a special building card to even get through the doors, a security guard who was always in uniform and would open the door for you if you looked like you needed help and was never in the slightest bit dirty. In my new building, there is also some kind of lobby watchmen, who sits inside this very small room (closet is a better word) and apparently is supposed to act as some kind of security for people entering the building and using the elevators. The problem is that first of all, this guy is not the kind of guy you want guarding a building. He is always visibly filthy, I mean comically filthy, smelly, smoking, and more than not, sleeping! I say give this guy a break, send him home and save us all the trouble of looking at him every time I (and the other renters) go in and out of the building. I feel less safe having this guy closer to my apartment.

Now we move on to the elevators. Let me remind you, this is a pretty middle to upper class apartment building. As a Chinese person, you have to be making a damn good salary to live in my building, and to own one of these places (instead of rent), the standard is even higher. There are two elevators, each beside the watchmen and the flies I just described to you. To a casual observer, the first thing you will notice is that they are not connected to each other. That is right. Have you ever seen such total nonsense in your life? Two elevators in a pretty tall high-rise apartment building and the elevators are not wired to each other. You can press the button for the right elevator and it will have no effect on the left elevator. You can press both buttons and both elevators will come down to you on the first floor. I did not realize that this is a potential technical and mechanical problem to overcome when a building is being built. I did not even realize this was a feature. I thought this was just how things are. I mean, it’s not like every single elevator in the WORLD has this feature built in. Oh wait, it does. And the funny thing is worse when I am on my 9th floor where my apartment is situated. I can press the button for one elevator and then press the button for the other elevator and the same will happen. Both of them will come to the 9th floor. (I did this every time now as a silent protest to whoever is at fault for such ridiculousness).

But wait, we are not finished with the elevators. There is one more. A first glance at the left elevator will tell you that there are ‘rules’ for the left elevator that are not labeled on the right elevator. Despite being in Chinese, they go something like this: During certain times of the day, like 1pm - 4pm Monday - Friday, the left elevator is CLOSED. They turn the power off and only the right elevator is open. So now, during those times, you have a twenty story building being serviced by one friggin elevator. Now, maybe my logic does not line up with anyone else’s logic, but is it a big expense to run an elevator, in terms of the cost of running a twenty story apartment building? These apartments sell for $300,000 - $400,000 (USD). Is it too much to ask to have everyone pay a dollar a month or whatever it would cost to run both elevators all day. This is another feature that I did not realize was in fact a feature until it was taken away from me.

Next, let us take the elevator (the right elevator since the left elevator is metaphorically closed) up to the 9th floor and to my actual apartment. There are two doors to my apartment. Each floor has about 5 apartments on it, all about the same size as my own and also on every floor is some kind of switchboard that controls electricity, water and any other utilities for all of those apartments on the floor. So instead of designing the building so that this switchboard is in a location that is easily accessible for everyone on the floor, the elusive building designer decided to put that switch board inside of the entrance to my apartment. So my apartment has the first door, which opens into a small entrance hall, and on the wall, is this weird switchboard that controls the five apartments on this floor. So long story short, I need to always lock two doors, one for the outside door and then one for the inside door because the building managers have keys to the outside doors and god forbid that they come inside my house and steal all my shit. (And I guess normally this is not the worst thing to complain about, but since I am not a door locking person to begin with, this kind of drives me crazy.)

Ok, through the second door, we finally enter the apartment and we are in the kitchen. The apartment itself is actually quite nice and luxurious. I could spend an entire blog post bragging about how big it is and how nice the floors are and how big my TV is, but this blog post is for complaining dammit, that wouldn’t be any fun to read! So first, we have the refrigerator. Oh god, the refrigerator. Now when we first moved in, the refrigerator was a complete joke. It was just so bad, I could not even believe the owner could show us an apartment of this quality with a refrigerator that was so shitty. But he was nice and he offered to give us his fridge, which gave him an opportunity to buy a new one at his home. So when we moved in, we had this fridge (and our couch / living room set) that he had given us. Now after using this fridge for several months now, I have come to hate it, with a passion. It is literally the worst fridge I have ever come across in my life. It is worse than the mini-fridge I had in my dorm room that Uncle Marty gave me when I went to college that stood like 2 foot tall and leaked coolant. It is just the most illogical piece of crap I have ever seen. First, the fridge stands reasonably tall. It’s not as wide as the big American fridges I have become accustomed to, but the size I can handle. The problem lies in its design. It has three compartments. The first, which takes up the top half, is for the freezer. Besides taking up WAY too much space for just the freezer, I don’t have too many complaints about it. Below that, is a section which takes up about 20% of the total space and contains… you guessed it… MORE FREEZER! Apparently this section is for items that should be kept at slightly colder temperatures. So there are two sections of freezer, taking up about 70% of this refrigerator. The rest of the 30% is for actual fridge space and its all the way at the bottom, which is totally inconvenient for just about anything I ever take out of the fridge.

Then, the fridge offers no adjustments, whatsoever. So when I go to make breakfast in the morning and I poor the milk into my cereal bowl and realize that the fridge just does not keep the milk cold enough (because I just like ice cold milk; semi-cold Milk, especially semi-cold Chinese milk, is just garbage), I can’t do anything about it. There are no dials or switches or levers or anything that would allow me to make the fridge colder. On the flip side, the freezer(s) are all too cold. The ice cream, which should be anything other than rock hard after a period of time in the freezer is always just that, rock hard. The meat, which I freeze from time to time when it’s on sale at the market, always has freezer burn, ice burn, and frost on it because the freezer is just too cold. So that’s our refrigerator.

Towards the end of the refrigerator, we have our world renown stove. Actually the kitchen design is quite nice. It’s pretty modern, the decoration fits the rest of the house. Then towards the end of the kitchen, tucked away inside what was probably originally a closet is this ’stove room’. It is so small, it houses a stove on one side, a sink on another side and a window beside the stove. Besides the stove being just really crap quality and small, only two burners with dials that make it damn near impossible to adjust the temperature of the gas fire, the room is just not suitable for a guy of my stature. Plus, cooking in a small compartment like that for any period of time, it becomes incredibly hot, steamy, dirty. Obviously whoever decided that there should be a huge kitchen with a modern design, a little island bar, and nice counters, and then stuff the actual cooking area into some closet has never done a day of cooking in their life. No cook would ever design something as stupid and ridiculous as this.