New Digs
Wednesday, May 10th, 2006
Have been in my new place for about two weeks so far, and I’m loving it. Kinda sad that I’ll only have it for 3 and a half months. I was able to get a 3 bedroom place for only a little more than the 2 bedroom places I had seen. And this one is a lot nicer, the only downside is that it’s on the seventh floor, and there is no elevator. I actually don’t mind really, it means a great view and good exercise. And now that there are three bedrooms, my Aussie buddy Mason, who I met in India, will move in with Damien (when he gets here) and I. It’s funny with apartments here, right now the vacancy rates are a bit high, so what you can get at a certain price level varies a lot. Some nicer places are going for decent prices since demand isn’t so hot. But you really have to look around. I saw a huge difference in quality of places while looking within quite a narrow price range.
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Date: 05/10/2006Views: 609
Besides all the work getting set up for the new place, not too much has been going on. Last week was the May Golden Week. I’ve talked about the holidays before, basically since the rest of the country is on the move, it’s best just to stay home! It is a week long break, but people actually only get 3 days holiday. They work the weekend before (essentially trading Sat and Sun for the following Thurs and Fri) so that they can get 7 days off in a row. The Golden Week holiday scheme was introduced just a few years ago and has been immensely successful in stimulating domestic tourism. However, as more and more people achieve the level of affluence needed to travel I think the government is going to have change the policy soon. Sooner or later they are going to have let people choose when to take holidays, in order to spread out vacations and relieve pressure on the transportation systems. At least that’s my take.
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Date: 05/02/2006Views: 525
Dad and Monica arrive in three days. We are going to spend about 4 days in Shanghai and then go travel the country for 2 and a half weeks. So there will be plenty to report soon enough. In the meantime, go check out www.danwei.tv which has very interesting short news type videos on China. They are based in Beijing and give a much better look at China than most of the stuff you will see on TV back in the West.