Living

View from the appartment

After consulting about three different realtors, and having looked at about 25 to 30 appartments, I finally found a suitable place to live in. I feel a little bad since realtors only get paid if they find you an appartment, so there was a lot of futile work involved, but on the other hand it's hard to feel any regrets sice I finally found my own place. In this matter you usually don't get a minute to think here: if you don't take an appartment right away, the next day it'll probbaly be taken by somebody else. One time I actually said I would sign the contract for an appartment quite close to the campus and when I got there I actually ran right into some other fellow students signung it, only because they came there 15 min earlier. Renting an appartment is a lot cheaper here than in Germany. Funnily enough the price is majorly based on the number of rooms and maybe a little bit on the location (getting more expensive the closer it gets to the campus), but size and quality do not really have an influence. Roughly said you always pay between 700-1300 元 (80-100 Euro) per room. Obviously you could always pay much more if you wanted to. Amazingly the prices for buying an appartment are basically the same as in Germany, maybe even more expensive.

Bad picture of my room
 - I'll take a better one later

From that point of view it wouldn't really make sense to buy one, especially taking into consideration that after the law you can only own a houses or any ground for 70 years, and after that it goes back to the state. But Chinese families in this area expect of the future husbands of their daughters that they have an appartment of their own, so everybody is trying to get loans to pay these insane prices. It gets even more difficult with many businessmen speculating on the home prices rising higher still, so in cities like Shanghai there are actually many appartments empty. It's a vicious cycle that eventually probably will have to end in a crash. On the other hand, the result is now that it actually isn't as great to have a son in the city anymore, like it was for families on the countryside. So at least the ratio women to men might return to a normal level through this weird situation.

Ophelie and I paying rent

Like I said the market is really fast, and it is also common to pay for an appartment at least 3 months in andvance. This starts to be funny if you consider that the highest bill in China is worth 10 Euros. So renting an appartment feels a little bit like doing something really illegal with a big bunch of money.

Maybe now would be the point to once again try and explain how my living situation has actually been earlier. After living in the appartment of Xin, Christine and Flavio, I had to move to a youth hostel, which was actually really good. The owner, Linda, helped us with most things, and most importantly helped us find an appartment. Now, I'm living in a 3-room apartment with a nice French girl, Ophelie, who's going to be studying in yet another Nanjing university. There was still a lot of cleaning to do after getting the appartment, but now it's looking quite alright. On foot it's about 15-20 min to the building where I have my lectures and it's pretty close to a Xinjiang restaurant.

At the beginning I was still really ambitious to find some chinese roommate, but it is really hard. The guys usually share a room (which is just a little too close for me for a whole year) and the girls are either forbidden to live with other men from their parents or they are out to find a rich foreigner. I didn't want to rush into anything, so I put this decision of; Ophelie is only here for half a year and then I'm going to think about it again.