A soft landing (kind of)

Have to start with a small disclaimer - worry not (reading the title) that everything is 100% smooth and there's not really much to report in terms of mischief or trouble making.
Knowing that my 3 readers are into some China-bound action stories, be sure I'd find something to tell you, sitting next to a quiet pond on a lovely warm spring day in Canada.

To keep things short and sweet (per post, relatively speaking), I will just have to split into a few posts at one go, as it took me a while to sit myself down and start updating.

As far as what is ultimately supposed to be a backpack trip in rural China, this was as soft a landing as possible, I guess.
For one, I made it easily enough (along with my checked-in bag) all the way through to Kunming, despite of the tight transfers. This includes a 3-hour scheduled transfer in Shanghai - requiring an on-time landing, getting my luggage, clearing customs and immigration, commuting/ locating another terminal, and checking in for the local flight.
This was all done with 2 hours to spare somehow, only to find out last minute that I forgot my iPod on my Shanghai-bound flight. Not an enormous loss on its own, other than I will now be deprived of my music and Chinese listening-courses for the next 3 months - can be quite painful.

And so, I will have to rely on whatever means I will find along the way to help me pick up some Chinese. We'll get to that in notime.

As of the landing's softness, I had someone pick me up at Kunming's airport, and take me directly to my pre-designated apartment. Well, there you go ... not really the pre-designated apartment.

Airport pickup - the only non-Chinese

Although I was promised a fully-furnished apartment in a specific location, to be shared with other students of this so called "language school", they forgot to mention they had some logistical change-of-plans, and so relocated me to their "new apartment", which I am to share with one of the Chinese employees of the company - as it happens, the only one who does not speak any English other than "Long live Chairman Mao".

"New" in this case, refers mainly to the fact that they had no time to equip the apartment with a lot of the essentials, which they apparently plan to slowly add up, with me serving as a free consultant on what's missing - not a bad deal, only that my consultancy fee here is not too exciting. There's a whole kitchen that they proudly showed me when I entered, but I soon found out that the Gas-cooker is without gas, the fridge is within-plans, no kettle, no utensils, .... you get the picture.
Plasma TV with extra stereo-speakers, but not connected to the cables (the box is there). etc etc.

As I said though - soft landing - as much as it will get to here. I'm on the 24th floor, overlooking the city-center's famous "green lake" park, the shower does work, and does have hot water, I have a bed, there's a leaving room with couches.

View from my bedroom, over Green Lake and a 100 year-old but active military training facility

Oh yea, and I have a fully Chinese-capable roommate. Yea. Chinese non-privacy and all.  He's called Zhang. Excellent, extremely friendly and touchy guy. Old-school, and yet very open to experience the weird foreigner mind. One of my proudest moments thus far is when I managed to get him to say "Drink Tea" (rather than "drink'a-tea") - not as easy as it sounds.
Zhang is ex-military, and not a newbie to Kunming or Yunnan - he was down in the south of Yunnan bombarding Vietnamese cities back in the days. He's actually from Shanxi province.
Zhang is very caring, as I said, so after I found myself locked out of the apartment one night at 2AM, as he decided to use an extra bolt on the door ... when we were asking him about the extra-locking, he really wanted to know when and where I went out to.

Working with this school's staff on getting things to the apartment, is really a quick-course into some work and general ethics here. Of course, this is about to be a very generalized quick-and-dirty generalization, but that's how observations work. Reliability, Accountability, Delivery ... not really. And I'm actually talking directly to the office's American program manager. This has been a daily routine, in which I'm being promised that a whole bunch of things would be at the apartment "today". I mean, how difficult can it be to buy a few plates, glasses and a kettle?!

All and all, things are good and comfy - as far as it can get here, I guess. By now I have a fridge, a hot/cold water dispenser (bottled), bought a few DVD's for the TV, got a local phone, laying low in a big city (next little post on that I guess), listening to Chinese-opera enthusiasts at the park from the 24th floor.

Finding an Apartment in Dublin

Yes, this is something that anybody relocating to a new city or country will normally have to go through (although this assumption does not hold for quite a few friends back in Japan that were “put” into a comfy corporate-apartment).

In a way, there is something nice about searching for a new place, exploring the possibilities – if you will, but for me, the process of finding a new apt has always been painful more then anything else. This is especially true when you quickly find out that there is no way to find any apartment half-descent for less then 1,000 Euro here.

This kind of understanding takes away immediately the excitement part related to exploring “possibilities”, and it becomes more a matter of survival and prioritizing. After looking into a few apartments available for about 1,000-1,100 Euro that were rented-out on the first day that they were publicized, and that did not really look like something I wanted to live in, my prioritizing exercises where coming up with the main result of “spend more money”.

I got especially desperate after going to see an apt that was on offer for 1,200 Euro a month, in a spot-on location – no furniture, old and ugly, and smelling really bad, with a hole-in-wall-in-the-corridor that was supposed to be the wardrobe.

So relative to all of this, I guess I should be quite happy and satisfied with my lovely one-bedroom into which I moved last week. The living room IS quite big, and it has most of the basic things one should need (even some knives and forks that the former tenants left behind, and … mmm … a scale … was that a hint for me ?).

Once my things will finally arrive by sea, the next big challenge will start of how I manage to push all of them into this apartment, as relatively-big as it may be.

And here you go, a revealing picture of the living-room and balcony.

Just before all my things arrive, and the apartment becomes way-smaller, and actually just before I actually moved in, I thought it was the right timing to throw a little welcome-to-Dublin party for myself. Doing the party before actually moving in was probably not such a bad idea.

I have the impression it was a nice party all and all (from what I managed to recollect the following day), and the half-day that I spent picking up all the empty beer-bottles was supportive of this impression. And no worries, I found quite a few bottles/cans that were kindly left for my future use and/or parties J

To rap up on this story, here is another picture of the same porch, this time with a few party-guests, just before they found out that there is also a very nice garden-roof that they could smoke at.

More information coming up

Hi All,

It seems that the wonders of free information on the internet indeed work, as I just found out I have readers that I actually don't know ... :)

One has even taken an active role posting a comment on my single post so far. This is definitely increasing the pressure for me to write again pretty soon, as this BLOG is not meant to be written about information flow on the Internet, but rather to write about life here in Dublin (that is, until I travel somewhere else to write about).

So your answers - dear reader - will be soon answered (to some extent, at least, I hope), although I will need some time to actually explore the life here (and specially the advancement part ... what is that ?) so I can write all about it.

Once I get to download some pictures, I will probably write about my moving-in party of last friday - finding and moving into an apartment is an integral part of any moving-into-a-new-city BLOG, probably :D