The Lemmertorium

I wrote this on Wednesday afternoon, 6-7-06, right after moving out.

Tuesday morning we were telling our new Chinese teacher that we would be moving to a new part of Pingdu sometime in the near future. It’s Wednesday afternoon now, and I’m in the new apartment. Living here. It happened pretty quickly, let me tell you why.

It happened on account of the following two things:

1. Our landlord asked us to get out. We made the mistake of mentioning to him early on that we’d be leaving several weeks before we actually left. I think his relationship with us was significantly severed at that point, and he hunting for a way to get us out quickly (and get a new renter in).My suspicion is that he has people in mind who want to rent the apartment now, and they’ll probably pay him more than we have been.
2. Our apartment is falling apart. All at once it seems. The bathroom had been leaking significantly about a month ago-we got that fixed. No sooner had we done that than the kitchen sink began leaking. Yesterday afternoon our neighbors underneath us showed up. I’d never seen them before, but they stayed around until Kyle told them 15 times that he’ll fix the sink-and even then they were unhappy he wouldn’t go down to look at their apartment. Besides these things, the shower head fell off the wall, the washing machine’s hose broke, and more of the coffee table’s finish wore away. It was certainly time to move before the apartment detached itself from the rest of the building and fell down onto the market below.

So we moved out. Last night was hectic, as we had a mad scramble of packing up all of our worldly possessions in rotted cardboard boxes and skinny plastic bags. We were still packing when the movers came to the apartment at 7am this morning. Lacey, bless her, was up at 4:30 this morning packing. She, by far, gets the award for most items packed.

We loaded our stuff onto a truck this morning and drove to the new apartment. Our apartment is brand new, so new that the landscaping and several of the other buildings are nowhere near complete. Our first order of business was to find enough planks to traverse the three ditches between the truck and our door. Thus negating the need of Indiana Jones “Leap of Faith” style jumps, which we’ve previously been accustomed to. Once we accomplished this there was the matter of the price. True to Chinese custom the movers said “this is too much work, we need more money” as soon as the truck was parked. In this particular instance I think they had a valid point, but I imagine they give this line to everyone they move for. The bargiaining began, and they were able to double their wages.

They moved up our stuff without a hitch, by tying it in bundles on their backs and trudging up the stairs. I was impressed. One guy carried our refrigerator up 6 flights of stairs by himself. They were friendly and efficient, though maybe a little greedy. So now it’s 3:40 in the afternoon. I’m tired and a little cranky. I’m writing this in OpenOffice (as we don’t have the internet here yet) and want to fall asleep. Hopefully we’ll head to the market soon and buy ourselves some furniture-like a mattress-so that we can sleep tonight.