My Home

My Home was the name of a restaurant we went to a lot in Beijing because it was next door to our hotel. But this post is actually about the apartment in Taiyuan I will be living in for the next ten months.

Welcome to My Home. I live on the sixth floor of an apartment building on the campus of the school I teach at, Shanxi Modern Bilingual School.

I share my home with two other girls on my team, Hailey and Lindsay. This is our living room. Our teaching resource library is on the shelves on the back wall.

This is the view from our living room window. There are two large apartment buildings being built right next to us. Construction continues 24/7.

This is our dining room. Our table is currently covered with a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle because we recently discovered all three of us love to do puzzles.

This is our kitchen. We have a baby refrigerator in the corner and a baby oven (a.k.a. toaster oven) on the desk/counter.

Here is our sink. We try to keep up on our dishes because there is little room for them to pile up.

And our gas stove with one temperature setting: ON. Better keep that food moving or it’ll burn.

This is our bathroom. A cement curb and a shower curtain separates the shower from the rest. We don’t currently have a working hot water heater, but maybe next week? I don’t do cold showers so bird baths are my friend. They did kindly provide us with Western toilets though.

And finally my room. I have a blanket on my wall because the walls are not painted so the white dusty plaster rubs off when you touch them. My bed is comfy enough. I have become used to the hard mattresses found everywhere in China.

This is the desk in my room where I do my lesson planning. I found a lovely map of the United States to hang above it and that’s my air conditioner above it.

And that’s where I keep all my clothes. I do laundry about once a week in our Chinese washing machine (you fill it with a hose connected to the sink, it swishes your clothes around, you drain out the water and put them in the spinner, then hang them to dry). I have a rug outside my door because my room is a “no shoes” zone. I try to keep it clean!

This is the view from my window. It’s a really smoggy day today.

Thanks for taking the tour! Come visit anytime!