Living in Beijing
October 4th, 2005
The good news is I once again have power and even internet access at my apartment in Beijing. I even had someone come and look at the place today. The rent at 2500 RMB per month is deemed a bit high, but the place is nice and big. Wu Dao Kou is a very easy place to live for foreigners, especially foreigners studying at Tsinghua.
I’ve managed to come down with a cold, I blame my first swim in probably 20 years and the unheated changing rooms.
I ordered two new CDs from Bloodshot Records and they arrived in a very timely manner. I’ve yet to listen to them but I highly recommend the Waco Brothers and the Detroit Cobras. I’ve also been using the iTunes music store to aquire the odd track here and there that I like, but don’t have on CD, either because I never bought the album or I own it on vinyl or cassette.
Of final note I’ve been spending a lot of time at the Sculpting in Time cafe and I like it for the most part, but the apartment agencies are so cutthroat they tear down my ad for a roommate the day I put it up. It isn’t the cafe staff that is for sure. I’ve learned of a couple other bulletin boards in Wu Dao Kuo but I’ve also posted it on CraigsList Beijing and That’s Beijing where no one can tear it down.
Update: I have a lot of posts tagged China but not all of them had photos because bandwidth used to cost a lot more, I probably still pay too much but I also pay for Flickr where I’ve carefully curated my best China photos, one of Beijing is now included below.
2024 Update
It has now been over five years since I left China. Maybe I’ll go back someday, but it wasn’t the happiest time of my life especially 2005 and early 2006. Nonetheless, I got it in my head to redo my blog’s taxonomy again. I also wanted to check old links. I removed several busted links from this post, one of which the old Sculpting in Time Cafe website.
When you blog from inside the Great Firewall it is hard, so people who have hundreds of posts published from inside China like me are probably rare. My webhost changed again a couple years ago, I’m not crazy over this, but I still pay for Flickr and I still use Apple products and I have my carefully sorted iPhotos I mean just Apple Photos now going back to 2002 when I first got a digital camera. So in the interest of completeness and improving the Quality of my blog I dug up old pictures of my aprtment in Wu Dao Kou, these would be the exact photos I posted to CraigsList back in 2005.
Haven’t heard from my old roommate since I left China the first time in 2006. A lot of people just haven’t kept in touch, but I don’t blame them all, I wasn’t the easiest person to like back then. I’m not sure old pictures of an apartment rented to a foreign exchange student will sent the Internet on fire, but if you have comments you can leave them below. I did live in China again, so I have a lot of pictures and posts from inside the Great Firewall.
This entry was originaly posted on , it was last edited on and is filed under: Rambles and tagged: Beijing, Cafe, China.
During the course of my MSN chatting with Darlene and Maria, two people called about the apartment. The first was a non-starter as his English was really limited as was my Chinese. The second was more promising but they changed their mind and didn’t actually come and see the place. I’d already shown it once this morning. It is possible the price is a bit high, but when my ad is actually viewable in Wu Dao Kuo people are at least interested so I must go out and put the ad up again.