2015 Settling In!

We did it, we retired, (well I did anyway, Huan was already retired!). We left Harbin on the 2^nd June 2015 after handing over our school rented apartment and flew off to Hainan. It’s not such a short flight so we spent a night in one of the ‘Seven Days’ hotels and awoke to this the next morning.

Off we went then in a charabanc, Sanya to Wuzhishan, not very good for wifey, she gets travel sick in buses, especially driving through windy mountain roads. I was busy looking at maps with my Nokia trying to work out where we were and where we were going. Eventually we arrived and struggling off the bus with all our baggage tried to find a way home. Taxis are not usually ‘hailed’ in Wuzhishan, there’s no call for them, so we had to phone one. We got one, and to take us probably less than a kilometre, he charged ¥30, a little steeper than the prices in Harbin! While we were waiting I happened to see some pre-packed ducks: -

Once home we had a much needed coffee while I tried to stop Huan going crazy and trying to clean as if we had only a little time. At this stage all we had in the house was a kettle, a bed, some damaged wardrobes and approximately 50 boxes of stuff from Abu Dhabi. Eventually I managed to get Huan to admit she was hungry and so was able to drag her out. This was our first experience on a ‘Wuzhishan Taxi’ otherwise known as a motorbike seating the driver and two adults. Sometimes in fact, they seat driver and three or even whole families. It was also the occasion of our very first selfie.

Did I say ‘settling in’ earlier? That implies rest and relaxation doesn’t it? Far from it came the answer! It soon became apparent that work was required and outside help would be needed. Both bathrooms needed some work done on them, cabinets, mirrors and lights replaced, shower fittings replaced etc. The kitchen wasn’t right at all and would have to be completely re-done. All the walls would have to be sanded and repainted; no one seems to have heard of undercoating in China. Added to this of course we would need to buy furniture for all the rooms. Once all these costs mounted up we realised that our (for that read ‘my’) dream of a coffee shop cum bar would have to be shelved. Our budget for that would be eaten up and we would in fact need the rent from the business premises to help us out. C’est la vie!

So we progressed. First to be finished was the closing off the kitchen balcony. We no longer had the nice view, as you may remember, and we decided that the washing machine had to go somewhere.

Next up was the spare bedroom just in case we did get any visitors. All this furniture was bought from the local shops, (expensive) and the curtains done by the lady across the road. I’m sure she also put her prices up for me too but she did a good job.

Next up was our bedroom, so that we could stop putting sheets over the windows at night time and so that we could begin to start unpacking some of those 50 boxes. Trying to find wardrobes to match a bed that had been bought nearly eight years before wasn’t so easy, but we came close enough.

The third bedroom was next, or should I say the office. We needed to get the computers up and running and my frogs were a bit cheesed off at me ignoring them since 2007. It also meant I could start unpacking my beloved books, the ones I had had to fight Huan to put in the boxes in the first place.

Bathrooms followed shortly thereafter. The cabinets and sinks were done by the local builders, which in UK terms definitely means ‘cowboys’! They were nice enough guys and I’m fairly sure they didn’t cheat us, well not too much anyway. The problem was that none of them seemed to have anything in the way of training. That seems to be the way here in China. It is slowly changing though. Mirrors, lights and ‘medicine’ cabinet were sourced from Taobao and done by yours truly.

Dear readers, if anyone is actually reading this of course, there’s a big lesson to be learnt here too. During the installation of the second new shower unit, some of the tiles were damaged. It is not exactly disguised in the picture, but have you ever tried to match tiles eight years after the initial work? It may be possible in the UK, but here in Wuzhishan, absolutely not.

The kitchen was also another learning experience, not just for us, but for the contractors too. They had never had a customer who asked so many questions and who had specific requirements in mind. ‘How high?’ he asked when we told him we wanted the worktops to be 1 metre high. He also queried the height of the wall cupboards, the sizes of the holes for the sink and the hob and the hole for the built in oven. Once we had received those items from Taobao, we brought him to measure up and he was suitably impressed. By the time the kitchen was finished I was also suitably impressed. It seems everything is cut and prepared in Guangzhou and then shipped here. It worked. Huan had wanted to knock the wall down and create a ‘real’ foreign kitchen but if we had done that there would have been nowhere to eat! It is a small kitchen, but bigger than any other we’ve had in China and we can both be in there without coming to blows.

The last room to be finished was the living cum dining room. Trying to find furniture for that was no easy task. In the end we gave up in Wuzhishan. Ledong, where we also own a one bed-roomed apartment, was also a failure. In the end it was the lady from Dong Feng in Sanya who told us where to go. What a place, warehouse after warehouse of furniture that would suit us. You might spot a few more frogs if you look closely.

We decided that the hall would be our ‘art gallery’ with one wall being devoted to siblings and the other undecided. (Still undecided to it remains Santorini as I write)

The finishing touch for us was finding somewhere to keep our shoes, my fragrant delicacies and my wife’s durian imitators. (Good job she’s not reading this!) Huan wanted a typical stainless steel gate; I wanted something rather more elegant. We’re both pleased with the result, what do you think?

During our time in Harbin I had got one of the TAs to teach Huan how to use Taobao. What a godsend that was. There was so much that we needed to buy from there from cutlery dividers to gas hobs, electric ovens, office desks, the list goes on and on, and is still going on now! I guess we hadn’t realised just how provincial Wuzhishan was, despite supposedly having a population of 150,000.

So that was the house finished, what else happened during this ‘settling in’ period. Well we had our seventh anniversary dinner in the local western restaurant. I must say I was impressed. It was one of the best western meals I’ve ever had in China, although as you can see, the Irish coffee came long before I had finished my dinner. Unfortunately, the standard has gone down ever since!

We also started to take walks around the city; it is a very pleasant place to live, apart from the rain. More about that in future posts. We stumbled across some of the local wildlife.

In fact we even found wildlife outside our window. The mountain may have disappeared, but the cows were still there. I often wonder how they know where they are going and how they know what time to go home again.

In September we bought our latest car. In Harbin, as you may remember, we had sold the Liebao because of its battery problems. Well we had then bought a Geely, which incidentally was the car I was driving when I decided a dash cam was a necessity after a policeman waved us through a red light complete with traffic cams. Luckily nothing came of that. My budget was a little more restricted than I had hoped so 4WD was off the cards. We ended up with a Dong Feng AX7 and I must say up to now, I have had no problems.

We found out in October that hotel swimming pools in Wuzhishan close ‘off season’. This means they are really only open from May until September. We’ve since found out that even when they are open, no one uses them. What a waste!

For some strange reason we seem to have no photos of November at all so that brings us up to December. The house was finally as we would like it to be. I had managed to get some Christmas pudding, (off Taobao of course), we had made some mince pies, so along with the turkey, (from Corners Deli) I managed to Give Huan the Christmas she deserved.

Well that’s it for settling in. You can get what you want in China, you just have to persevere. Stay tuned for the next episode which will be 2016. Don’t worry, the blogs will get shorter once we reach 2017!