Annoyances and Peculiarities about China

Shane mentioned on his blog that he can’t wait to hear some negative things about China because my blog is always so positive. So, I don’t know if these things are necessarily negative, but they are things that I find different or peculiar. But, I have to mention also that I find amusement in all the different peculiarities of living in a new place, so it isn’t really a negative thing to me.
First, I’ll talk about the annoyances of our apartment (all of which have been fixed somehow)
*The first few days we were here, I kept running into all the door knobs. All our doors have the straight sharp knobs that you just push down on kind of like the ones you would find on French doors at home. Anyway, they kept jabbing into me and it would really hurt. I don’t know if the doorways are slightly skinnier here or what, but it happened so many times that it was driving me crazy. Finally, we took off our kitchen door (that was where it happened most frequently). And I guess I have adjusted to the other doors because it hasn’t happened for a long time now.

* Second, our shower—our shower spout was hung at about my shoulder level. I know that Chinese people are short, but that seemed even a little too short for them. It was really annoying trying to take a shower. So, Jason bought a new little hanging thing and the nice maintenance people in our apartment came and installed it higher for us. So, now we have two hangers.
*Lastly, and probably the worst thing—our bed. A King size bed here is just two single mattresses put together. They put them together going sideways, so there was a big crease down our bed right about where our lower backs were. I already have a bad lower back so my sleeping the first few nights was miserable. Plus the mattresses are a lot harder than I like. We remedied this problem as soon as possible. We bought a foam pad from IKEA and then flipped the mattresses so that the crease was down the middle the other way. With the foam pad on top, you can’t even feel the crease anymore. We’ve slept well ever since.
*I guess since I’m already complaining about my apartment, I’ll throw this in too. I love how nice everything in our apartment is, but it’s also hard. We’ve never had any nice furniture and there’s probably a good reason for that—our children. I’m constantly on edge that they are going to destroy everything. I feel like they can’t really play in their own house. They’ve already colored on the walls and floors a bit. And Britton, using his toy hammer, beat up one of the corners of our hallway. I guess one day while the Aiee was watching them, Britton just hammered away on the wall. (That’s another whole complaint, too, I have no control on what my kids do when we’re away and I have no way to communicate any sort of rules or anything to our Aiee. She’s really great, but I don’t think Britton would have even dared hammer on the wall if we were home and if he did start, we would have stopped him right away.) A few days later though, there were maintenance men up there patching up the wall. I don’t know how they knew about it and I dread finding out how much they’re going to charge us for it. Anyway, we’ve never lived in an apartment, so I’ve always been able to just be kick-back and let them have fun. Now, I feel really uptight with them and that’s not really me. I guess it’s a good thing though because I’ve been dying to get nice furniture and I had planned to when we get home, but now I might think twice. So, it’s nice to have kind of a trial run with nice things and see how they do and how I feel after being here and what I want the atmosphere of my home to be.

Okay, that’s just stuff about my apartment, and we have REALLY nice apartments. There are so many other things about China that are peculiar, but I’ll save that for another post since I feel like I’ve already complained enough.