Britian to Beijing : Renting an Apartment, Beijing-style

One thing I find odd about Beijing, is that some things move so slowly, and other things are unbelievably fast. We went looking for apartments on the first full day, and the agents (who could not speak any English) showed us 4 different places. This only took roughly an hour, but then they would not show us anymore on that day. It appears that, by Chinese standards, flats that look like crack-dens are suitable accommodation for everyone, as the flats that we were shown were truly horrible. Strangely, everyone seemed to be trying to steer us towards getting the cheaper ones rather than the more expensive ones, which I can only assume is because they have been stuck with the rubbish ones for a while and are trying to force them onto foreigners.

The next day, Dan arrived, who is another of Rob and Kate’s friends from back in the UK, and it turned out that he had been let down on somewhere to live, so we decided to all look for flats together. Again, the same agents would only show us 4 flats, 2 of which were ok, the other 2 being of the crack-den variety. After getting fed up of these agents not really helping us, we took matters into our own hands and went to see the estate agents based within the compound where we were already staying to see if there were 2bed flats within the compound. The girl there also did not speak English, but tried very hard to make herself clear to us and got us on the phone with an English-speaking colleague to translate for her. They couldn’t have been nicer. We saw 3 flats within the compound (which is directly next door to both Dan’s school and the one that Allan and I will be teaching in) and immediately fell in love with one. It happened to be the cheapest of the 3, but absolutely amazing.

Twenty four hours later, we had the keys and were moving in. If these seems quick and easy, bear in mind we could’ve had the keys earlier but the owner of the flat was working so couldn’t get the keys to us! There was a bit of confusion with trying to get the agency we work for to come to sign contracts and transfer the rent and deposit, which held things up a little as well, so if all that had gone smoother, we probably could’ve moved in within hours of seeing the apartment! We still have a few small teething problems, the main one being that we are currently struggling to get our own internet connection to the flat, and we are finding it difficult to get anyone to help us sort it out, but we will hopefully be up and running on that soon.

We have ended up being massively lucky. Not only is the apartment gorgeous, and in the best location possible, but also the owner of the flat is a very lovely woman, who speaks fluent English! She has been very helpful already, replacing the old but perfectly functional tv in the front room for a brand new 42” HD one, just to be nice, and also giving us a router so we don’t have to pay for one when we get the internet installed. She has also given us the password to her own wifi so that we can get online while we wait for our connection to start! This has ended up being such a relief, as now we know if we do have any issues with the apartment, we can contact her directly and just have a chat about it, rather than having to go through our company and trying to make them understand the issues so they can translate to a landlord. She also lives in the next building in the compound, so she is literally 5minutes away from us.

Here is a little photo tour of our flat!