A lot has happened since my last post. By now, we have successfully moved into our new apartment!! It’s great, finally a place that feels like it can be a temporary home. Believe me, it was not easy to find an apartment in the downtown area of Shanghai with four bedrooms for only 5 months. Oh and of course we could not even say one sentence in Chinese and the majority of the realty agencies did not speak English. So here is what we did:
The process seemed to be the same in every agency. They offered us some apartments with only three bedrooms instead of four, but then just before we were ready to walk out of their office, they found an apartment that sounded worth looking at. We decided to get help from our Chinese friends who were a big help because we were not able to negotiate in Chinese and they were there to do the talking. One decision we had to make was whether we wanted to look for an apartment near our campus which is situated in the downtown area (this is where we have to go for our language course) or near the other campus where our mechanical engineering lectures take place (disadvantage: far away from the center of the city). The decision was fairly easy and we all agreed on the possibility downtown :) After spending a lot of time walking around and going from one agency to another and looking at many apartments, we were able to decide on one of them.
In the next picture you can see the four of us with a Chinese friend before signing the Chinese (!) contract. We had to pay the first rent and the deposit (27000 Yuan) in cash and the largest banknote over here is 100 Yuan. It was strange to walk around with so much money, but everything worked out and we are happy to live in the area that we have chosen.
After we had signed the contract, we invited the guy who helped us to negotiate with the Chinese landlord to have lunch with us. He also translated the contract and made sure that everything was correct. This was the first time that we ate food from the Hongkong area. You can see all of us during lunch in the next picture. I loved the various dishes and drinks and besides it felt good to have a nice place to stay for the next few months - great day! Pictures of the apartment will be coming up soon…
IN: our new apartment and neighborhood
OUT: the slowliness of this internet connection
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