After you’ve lived in China for a while (almost three years now for yours truly), a great many things become all too normal. I really hardly bat an eye anymore when people squat their children down on their knees to help them take a dump in front of store entrances or when an ordered restaurant dish arrives at the table, still alive, and presumably ready to eat as is or when our local market, rather than dumping supposedly melamine-laden milk (that’s been recalled, no less), merely offers it up at a tempting two-for-one discount. Still, occasionally, things still surprise me.
This week, the culprit is our apartment complex’s management company. This company is absolutely ridiculously terrible at what they do. In fact, if the complex weren’t so much better than every other complex we’ve seen, Christian and I wouldn’t even entertain the idea of staying here. However, it really is a spectacular complex with beautiful paths to walk, fountains, loads of playgrounds for Mr. Semi-Mobile Nico, strange sculptural copies of Picasso paintings and reasonably unobtrusive neighbors. So we’re willing to put up with a certain amount of stupidity, but we’re almost at the limit.
Just as we had finished negotiating for that fabulous apartment I was recently gushing over, and were waiting for the paperwork to be drawn up, the complex’s management company decided it was time to dig up three quarters of the available parking lots inside the complex and start enforcing a long un-enforced parking rule. It turns out that most of the parking spots around here are for sale for 65,000 RMB a spot. No one who buys an apartment in order to rent it out is going to pay 65,000 RMB for a parking spot though as there are a great many people who don’t have cars, and if you’re a renter, especially a renter from outside of China, you’re not about to pay 65,000 RMB for a few feet of pavement inside China. So basically, the only people who bothered to fork out that money were people who bought an apartment in order to live there and who already had a car.
In addition, this past weekend, the management company received a complaint about security. You see, we have all these young Chinese guards running around the complex and aside from some of the nicer ones who are occasionally gracious enough to help out lone mothers hauling small children and shopping up to their apartments, for the most part they never really do anything aside from play games and chat on their cell phones. A Canadian woman was accosted in her apartment by a former maid and some very large male friends of said maid, and when the Canadian called security to do something about the unwanted visitors, no one bothered to do anything. This of course begs the question: what is security here for?
It turns out our security force now is for yelling at you if you arrive by taxi or try to drive through the security checkpoints without a “parking card.” No outside cars are allowed in anymore, not even taxis. I fail to see how this solves the lax security issue as the hooligans probably arrived by bus and walked on in (and so far no one appears to be hassling people who arrive by foot), but there you go.
In the face of all these developments, Christian, who is even more inconvenienced than myself as he drives and greatly dislikes having to walk the extra quarter of a kilometer (whatever that is) at the end of a long work day, has gone back and forth, declaring first that we can live here anymore if the property management company isn’t going to let us rent a parking spot (on that subject, there were some parking spots available last month, but you only knew about it if you read the five complex Chinese pieces of paper plastered to some building doors, which of course, is beyond the abilities of most of the local foreigners who make up a considerable percentage of the complex’s residents) to now saying maybe, just maybe we can put up with having to park outside so long as we can still drive inside if we have things to drop off.
And that’s why our new apartment might not be quite the sure thing I had previously surmised, and also why I’ve been in such a bad mood all week.
2 Comments
I tend to play-down everything and like to think that I am not paranoid but selling the tainted milk really freaked me out! I hope you get the apartment of your dreams.
Well, actually, to be fair, it was green tea-flavored milk from one of the melamine tainted milk companies, so that flavor might have actually passed the test and as such wouldn’t be subject to the recall, as they were only recalling very specific batches. But still, it takes balls to risk that you might be selling kidney stones to small children.
Oh my gosh! Anytime I think we’re getting this apartment, something goes wrong! Argh! Presently, we’re packing and tentatively optimistic that we’ll be moving stuff this weekend…