beijing okay

Yesterday we found an apartment! It's quite inexpensive, 3300RMB a month, with three bedrooms, two balconies, kitchen and bathroom. There is cable in the house, a fridge, excessive dressers and totally random furniture, but no sofa. It's certainly a Chinese apartment and is run down, but is considerably larger than the last apartment we saw and significantly cheaper. (The last one was 5000RMB) Our landlord seems very nice, laughs a lot and, miraculous, speaks English. Soon I'll post pictures of the place and my new address.

We had to call our last realtor and explain to him that we would call him later and didn't want to sign the contract today. With our very, very basic Chinese, this isn't easy, so it went something like this:

"I am American. Today, I am very busy. Tomorrow, I will call you, okay?"

That really was awkward, so I further explained...

"Yesterday, we went together to look at houses." I couldn't actually remember how to say remember, so it sounded slightly accusatory or at least braindead obvious. I liked this realtor, but he simply didn't have cheap apartments in a good area.

Everything is really shut down this week for new year's, so no job searching. I have some things scheduled for next week, and I'm interested in working for a private tutoring company so I have flexibility. Sunday the new work week will start up again, this city will wake up, everything will open, and I can send out some postcards and a package.