7 Months...and a Date Night!

Yesterday evening Adam and I went on our first date ever...well since Zack was born...but it does feel like forever.  The only other time Adam and I ate a meal together without interuption was my cousin's wedding...we had a babysitter then but it wasn't really a date.  It was really nice to eat a meal at the same time and not have to rush.  We also got to go to a Hurricanes game...which we LOVE!  The game was very tame...not too many fights and very few penatlies.  Zack survived...and more importantly our babysitter survived...and said she would do it again!

This has been a BIG month!  We got out the "big boy" toys...things that require Zachary to do things with, however he still puts it all in his mouth.  He can sand up while holding on to things, he rolls all over the place and he crawls backwards.  I have orderd a couple baby gates and some plug covers.  I figure everything else we will take care of as it becomes a problem.  Right now Zacks biggest problem is trying to get somewere and ending up getting caught under the sofa.  We have tried lots of new foods and water in a sippy cup (he isn't really sure how to use the cup yet...but it's lots of fun to bang around and bite!).  He has 2 bottom teeth and no signs of any others coming in yet.
Here are some photo's from this past month!

YUMMMMMMM

still LOVES the bath!

He gets so excited when he sees me coming over with his bowl of food

look at my cutie!

"hmmmm why can't I pick this up?"

right before the freak out...at least we have 1 good pumpkin patch picture

Our New (hopefully) Apartment

Last week we went apartment hunting for 2 days right after our trip.  On day one our top three apartments were great but going to be a lot of work.  One had a ton of extra furniture and all of it was extra large leaving no floor space for a baby to have tummy time.  Another place was only half furnished and didn’t have any fixtures or appliances…even though the furniture was something I would have actually picked out myself we were worried that it would take a long time to get everything installed (remember our internet?).  The third place was finished brand new but unfurnished.  The landlady spoke a little English and wanted to take me shopping to pick out the furniture (can we say yippee!), however it was surrounded by construction that was covering the entire area with dust.  So we had to decide would the storage area and brand new furniture make up for the fact that we can’t open a window or hang my clothes outside to dry?

The next day we saw 4 more places, we were hoping that one of the 4 would be a no brainer and an easy apartment to move into.  The first three were awful!  They each were only 2 years old but the furniture looked like it came out of the dump.  Then we saw place number 4.  I walked in and the first thing I thought was ahhhh…clean.  My second thought was it looks like a really cute little girls room…what would Adam say.  Adam couldn’t look at this apartment because he had already taken 2 weeks off of work.  The sofa set was beige canvas covered with flowers (in a cute way) and all the other furniture was real wood…painted white.  It isn’t my taste but it was really nice and brand new.  Not only was the furniture brand new but the apartment had never been lived in, the refrigerator was a couple feet taller than the one we have now and there was a spa shower and bath in the master bathroom…all for a lower price than our apartment now. 

The goal was to find something that I would feel comfortable bringing an infant into and a place that had a garden where we could go for a walk and was convenient to grocery stores.  We found it all!!!!!  Now for the negotiations…

"They can't give you fast internet becaus you don't have any internet."

Yeah, we will have to go back to the internet store after they come install the internet in our apartment but at least they can make it faster!
Oh yeah…and we signed the lease to our apartment…and we have the keys!
Thanks to Rolyn the assistant at Adams work, and our favorite realtor, we are now apartment renters.  We signed the lease; they agreed to buy a refrigerator, a desk and a TV.  The desk arrived today and the refrigerator and the TV will be delivered tomorrow.  They also agreed to have a girl come and clean (there were mounds of grease on the stove and the bathrooms were dirty). 

I took our bedding to the cleaners and I spent the rest of the day packing our stuff, I even got a load ready to drop off this evening…how confusing for the Concierge who came to help me down for the bags…No, we are not checking out yet, No we aren’t taking everything.

Our Final Apartment Decision...For Real This Time...I Hope

It sure has been a long road...and we can't wait to move in. I personally can't wait to move out of the hotel!  Thank you to all of our family and Friends who have prayed for us to find a place.  I know when we look back we will surely laugh at all of this!

Our Apartment has great furniture, nice bathrooms, a large kitchen, no bars on the balcony, flat screen TV’s and more storage than any other place we have seen.  The pictures are from the first time we saw it I will update pictures once we get our stuff unpacked.

dining area

The living room

Can you tell I am giddy that there is a "western toilet"

Kitchen

Kitchen

House Hunting Yet Again

After the second place we knew we found it!  I will post pictures and more info as soon as it works out!  I just want to let our friends and family know that we feel really good about it!  We have let the right people know and as soon as Orientations contacts the owner, reviews the contract, sends the contract to Paragon, Paragon approves the contract, sends the contract to Cree and Cree signs the contract we can move in!

Apparently We Will Be Living At The Gold Lake Hotel

Not really, but we will be here for a while.  The perfect apartment that was ready for us to move into is apparently not so perfect.  We found out that yet another realtor was screwing us over (charging 2000 RMB more than they should per month).  Beyond sneaky realtors we chose the apartment that a Hong Kong criminal owns.  I don’t know what exactly he is involved in but it’s pretty bad and the last thing we need is to be involved in any way.  I doubt just renting his place would cause any problems for us, but the fact that we are foreigners who don’t speak the language we would rather not live in an apartment of a known criminal…who knows what we could get drawn into. 

The people at Cree that are from Huizhou are the ones that informed us of this and they advised us not to go any further with this place. 

It looks like we have another day of apartment hunting ahead of us.

Too Good To Be True

I am writing this the same day as the last two but felt we need to separate these events.  We met with the owner of the apartment and the first thing we (well they) did was discuss what changes needed to be made.  I mentioned that we wanted the wooden tub taken away, the heated floor mat taken away (the last residents were Korean and apparently they like to sit on the floor), we wanted the sofa’s changed to something with color and we wanted the netting taken off the balcony so we could enjoy the view.  Yes, they would take away the tub, No, they would not take away the floor mat (we decided it was OK because the floor was ceramic and we may want to use it to warm the place up for the winter) No, they wouldn’t change the sofas and No, the netting was for safety (although the majority of apartments didn’t have them).  The sofas are white leather with wooden detailing on the side, sitting on a white ceramic wall with white walls and pale yellow curtains as a background.  We said OK…you have no idea how hard it has been to talk to people and try to explain what you want, I don’t know if I said OK because I was tired of not having people understand me or tired of the frustration of not getting Joanna and Re-alta to get why needed to see other places or the fact that we were soooooo ready to be done with house hunting.  We spent almost two hours listening to who knows what as they negotiate the contract.  All the while I sat there looking at the furniture thinking I don’t know if throw pillows and blankets are going to cut it for me, and wondering what they were saying about the place we would live for the next year or so.  We left and came back to the hotel room and after some discussion (the first time we have had a chance to sit and talk about everything) we decided we needed to see other apartments in the same complex, with different furniture and curtains and maybe one that didn’t have a safety net that obstructs our view. 

The last thing I wanted to do was deal with Re-alta (who never seemed happy to show us around) and Joanna (who really never understood questions or concerns we had).  I know we are in a foreign country and that we should get used to things being frustrating…but this is the first home Adam and I choose together…it won’t just be our temporary apartment…it will be our home for our stay in China.  We needed to feel at home there.  We have been living in-between lives for a long time, not being able to use our wedding gifts and not being able to get things for my house or his house that would make either feel like our house because we were getting ready to move to China and thought it would be silly to get things that just needed to be stored.

Adam talked to friends at work that will see if they can help us find other apartment in the same complex.  Cree is also going to hold the contract until we ask them to sign it.
Two days later we were at dinner with people who knew Huizhou well and they knew people at the complex that were paying almost half of what our contract was for.  They told us that it sounded like the re-alta was working with his friends who were all going to cash in on our naiveté.  I am so glad I listened to my gut!  We will find a different realtor and take someone from Cree with us to make sure there isn’t anything shady going on.  Who knows we may end up with that apartment and new furniture or we may end up with a better place in the same complex (we saw the apartment on the 5^th floor of 26 in the 17^th building…so I am confident there is something else available).

It's a God Thing

After making our decision we walked around the mall at the city center.  It was very interesting…I can’t wait to document that later.  We stopped for lunch at Pizza Hut (Joanna and Re-alta picked it…they can’t get over the fact that we are Americans and will only like American things).  Pizza hut was actually different, a lot of the piz-a (Chinese for pizza…I love the translations that are based on pronunciation)  looked really good!

While at lunch I remembered the e-mail I got from an Australian woman who lives in Huizhou with her husband, she put the name of the apartment where they live.  It was the same place that we had just chosen.  She loves it there!  She said they also had friends who live in Park Royal (Apartment #2) and they have trouble getting taxi’s and they don’t have many neighbors, where as they are able to get taxi’s within five min. at any point of the day.

We headed off to Re-alta’s office to collect the contract and to kill time before we met with the owner for negations (or so we thought).  We actually stopped in front of a school “Thames Language School” a place I found online and that was recommended to Adam on his last visit.  We went inside and met with the headmistress who was British.  She said they weren’t looking for anyone now but they did have a new teacher in their new kindergarten at their other location (which happens to be right next door from our new apartment) who could use some volunteers.  She also mentioned that there was a bar just down the street and if we ever wanted to get away from the whole “China thing” she said after hours there are always members of the language school (that speak English) hanging out…so Adam got excited as well!

House Hunters International

We saw 10 places yesterday (4 houses and 6 apartments)…talk about overwhelming!!!  Today we saw one more located near the city center (the most developed area).

We started the day meeting Joanna and the realtor (Joanna introduced him as re-alta…and for the first half of the day I thought that was his name…after lunch I realized she was just calling him realtor).  Joanna was adamant about the houses because they were “very big” and “really nice” although they were far from anywhere to eat or shop or hang out.  Three out of the four homes were three stories and had four bedrooms.  We loved one of the four (I didn’t take pictures because the owner was there and I didn’t want to be rude) but they were all basically the same, the only thing changing was the furniture.  I took pictures of the empty one.  I think she pushed us toward the house because she knows that Americans like to live in houses and she was trying to make us feel at home. 

On a side note…the people in China are very hospitable; there was an older lady in one of the houses who was awesome!  She saw me slip a little (in China they must clean their ceramic floors by dumping buckets of water on them…I wore slippery shoes and that is not a good combo when searching for a home) so this old lady who was half my size took it upon herself to support me as we walked through the entire house.  Although we couldn’t understand each other I feel like we formed a bond.  She caught me looking at a family portrait and was so excited, she pointed out each person and I just new she understood me when I told her it was a beautiful family.  When we left her home she handed us each a handful of Chinese New Year Fruit (oranges?). 

Then we saw an apartment in the same community, which was considered “western style” it had an open floor plan and large furniture.  We liked it but it was on the third floor and it was all I could do to not slip down them all and bust my head open…either wear only shoes with traction or find another place.

After eating a very interesting lunch (there was a chicken with a head involved, and I do believe I swallowed part of the duck I should have…don’t worry everything else was great…I’m sure the chicken tasted fine but I couldn’t tell you), we went to the first apartment.  We like this location because it was near a shopping area where we could get groceries and go to eat, however it was still pretty far from the city center.

Next we saw two apartments in the same community; they both included western style décor and were in an up and coming part of town.  The plus is the community was beautiful…it’s almost like living in a park and the minus is there isn’t much in the area YET.  

Last we saw two apartments from yesterday were near the Jusco which is another shopping area (the one we went to in our first day in Huizhou)…they weren’t worth taking pictures of.  The furniture was cheap, the elevator was scary, the owner was creepy and there were holes in the wall (which we later found out were to hook up the air conditioner).  This place was 1/3 of our budget but they showed it to us anyway because we wanted to be near a shopping area.

Today Joanna and the realtor (re-alta) sat us down and told us that we wouldn’t be seeing any more apartments and there weren’t any good ones in the city center anyway.  We were pretty frustrated at this point because it was like pulling teeth to get them to agree to show is things near the city center in the first place.  We kept saying that we understand that the buildings were older and that the apartments weren’t as nice but we still wanted to see them before making a decision. 

Adam called one of his co-workers (who has lived in Huizhou for 20 years and has been telling Adam that we need to live near the city center) and we got the name of an apartment complex in the city center and we had Joanna force Re-alta to set something up for us.  In the meantime another one of Adam’s coworkers (who just moved his family from Raleigh to Hong Kong) called and told Adam that they felt forced to make a decision and that no matter what we shouldn’t make a decision today or until they show us everything…he said that Cree would have no problems paying for another day of orientations if we really wanted it.

Re-alta set something up at the suggested building…which like Joanna said was old and dingy.  As soon as the driver dropped us off in the area I knew I wouldn’t be comfortable alone there for a while.  I have never been a city girl and right across the streets were, what I would consider, slums.  I pictured living somewhere glamorous over the shops or something like that.  Both Joanna and Re-alta insisted that there was nothing else in the city center (closer to somewhere nicer).

These are the final 3 Choices:

Apartment #1 –

Pros: full sized refrigerator, treadmill, 2 really nice flat screen TV’s, near a shopping center that is already open, nice community with great security, closets in every room, modern bathrooms and kitchen appliances

Cons: need to drive to city center, not too close to Jusco, the furniture was ugly and lacked color

Apartment #2 –

Pros: nice furniture, wood floors, western style, wood cabanets in the kitchen, 2 master bedrooms, double sink in bathroom, office and 3 other bedrooms, walk in closet, 5 min drive to Jusco, nice garden feel in community, great security, closest to city center and walk street

Cons: nothing to walk to (yet)

House #4 –

Pros: huge, backyard opens to a stream, French guy lives next door and may speak English, nice gardens and ponds, very nice TV

Cons: far from everything, squatty potty on first floor, older furniture and appliances

We chose Apartment 1 without any hesitation!  We knew we had the option to change any furniture or take out anything we wanted (Joanna insisted at each place we visited “If you don’t like anything you tell me and they change…no problem”).  I hated the living room furniture; but everything else was perfect!