More About Apartment Living

We have really enjoyed the washing machine in the apartment. It is located in the bathroom, and it is small but adequate for two people. Very few people have clothes dryers. Our clothes dryer consists of a clothes rack in one of the extra bedrooms---we turn on the fan to help the clothes to dry, but with the high humidity, it takes at least 2 days. There are clothes hanging outside of most apartments every day. Our apartment has bars to hang clothes outside of our bedroom windows, but being on the first floor, it seems unwise to hang clothes out where they could easily be stolen. It has been interesting to us that many of our readers wear the same clothes for two or three days in a row. The college students wash their clothes by hand and hang them up to dry---so no wonder they do not want to change often!
Here are some pictures of apartments with clothes hanging out to dry. Notice in the first picture that many apartments have enclosed porches that make great "laundry rooms".




The TV in our apartment does not work, so we only get news from the Internet. ( We are very grateful to have a computer!) David and Sandi loaned us some old movies(Elizabeth Taylor collection, Cary Grant collection) to watch on the DVD player, so we have been watching them in the evenings.

We have a 5-gallon bottle of water with a dispenser. When the water runs out, Serena calls a man to come and bring new one (costs 15 yuan, or about $2.50). The delivery man comes by bicycle with 3 or 4 of the 5-gallon bottles with him. One of my readers told me that this is one of the worst jobs to have in Qingdao, because many of the apartment buildings (ours included) have no elevators, so the delivery man may have to carry the water bottles (40 pounds each) up to the 24th floor!

One interesting thing about the bathroom is that the shower is a section of the room that is partially closed off. The toilet is in the shower area, so every time you shower, the toilet gets wet! This arrangement seems to be very common here.