We moved in last Friday and have been living in a sort of stasis since. As mentioned, the new place is brand new, and so when we arrived to get the keys last Thursday we were happy to see a bunch of shiny new appliances to match — including a nice (Chinese brand) flat screen TV. As much as you can try to get excited about having a new mattress, washing machine or fridge; getting a brand new bright and big TV sort of takes the cake.

The TV is also a bonus for us, as 100% of our media consumption comes via the computer, and the flat screen displays just like a high def. monitor when hooked to my MacBook. Coupled with a 4Mbit Internet connection and xbmc, it’s on-demand, all the time.

Alright, enough about the TV — more about our new place and thoughts on Haikou in general.

So for the past week we’ve been sitting in an apartment with a lot of new appliances, and very little else. The day we were leaving from our temporary apartment, Maggie called the shippers only to find out our stuff was still in Shanghai. The shipper had told us it would be no problem to store it for free in Haikou should our apartment hunting take longer than expected, but upon finding out that it would cost money to store it in Haikou, he made the executive decision to just leave it in Shanghai until called upon.

Thus, when we called to find out where our stuff was (thinking it was either nearly or already here), we were a bit pissed to learn that it was still a few days drive away. To further ingratiate me to this swell and reputable shipping company, we were then informed we’d also have to pay an extra 200 RMB upon delivery to actually have our stuff moved into the apartment. Apparently, they’ll move it out and onto the truck for free, but you have to pay extra to have them move it in. Pairing that with their liberal weighing methods I mentioned previously, all I can say is — scam, scam, scam!

I know, I promised no rant. To their credit, the stuff did arrive, and we did manage to bargain down the 200 RMB to 100 RMB. Aside from a few dings here and there, and my aquarium stand being mostly de-plastic footed, everything was in one piece — amazingly, considering the shape the boxes were in.

Our New Place

Living in a brand new apartment has a lot of perks, and a couple of downsides. The perks are somewhat obvious — it’s clean, new, virtually all under warranty, there aren’t pounds of other people’s dead skin in your aged mattress, the stains are yours alone, etc.

In the negative column is the fact that every ding, scratch or crack is sort of on you. Gone is our ability to state with absolute confidence: “That was like that when we moved in.”

The other tricky thing with an apartment that’s never been lived in is that when put on the spot for things it needs, it’s hard to remember everything. We quickly hashed together a list for the landlord when we signed the contract, and then nervously called the next day to find out if the place had any sort of water heater (it did, but hadn’t been installed — one of those on-demand ones). Post move-in, and after the landlord was well on his way back to his home on the Mainland, we also realized half the rooms (including the bathrooms) don’t have blinds/curtains, there’s no microwave, no water-cooler thing for bottled water, and a few other relatively trivial things.

All of this is pretty easily solved, but it was just stuff that hadn’t occurred to us upon moving in as we’ve always just sort of moved in and were ready to go.

Minor quibbles aside, the place is great and so is the neighbourhood. It’s nice and quiet, with no road noise at all. We’re less than a block away from the sea — though unfortunately a development (by Li Ka-shing!) is blocking our way to the water. So instead we have to walk an extra 15 minutes down the road — the injustices we’re faced with, really.

We have a pretty diverse and decent outdoor wet market about a 10 minute walk from our apartment that contains all the fresh seafood and tropical fruit we could stuff ourselves with — along with an assortment of meat and veg. It’s surrounded by small shops that sell basic dried goods and essentials, as well as small stalls that do some local street food for quick snacks.

The community, though only at about 40-60% residence (and a portion of that part-time snowbirds/holidaymakers), is loaded with kids and there’s a small playground where Casey has already grown to love the swing. The community also has basketball courts, a small pond with fish and fruit trees everywhere (there is a papaya and a banana tree just behind our apartment).

We’re also walking distance to a great park that I mentioned before and a driving range, though I am guessing by the Beamers and Benzes in the parking lot that it might be a bit pricey.

Here’s a video and some photos from our apartment:

A few notes from the video:

1. One of our first orders of business is to replace that solid wood bench in our living room with something a bit more … plush.
2. Amazingly our 190L aquarium survived the journey and will soon be populated by fish — it’s former resident, my turtle, is now the class mascot for a bunch of youngins at the Suzhou Singapore International School. Getting the aquarium out of its wooden shipping crate (the remains of which can be seen on the back balcony) was a test of will and some skillful use of a rubber mallet. Kevin, you still have my real hammer!
3. Like the wood couch in the living room, the kitchen table will likely be replaced with something a bit nicer. We also have plans to kit out the living room with a rug that Casey can roll around on.
4. My compulsion to wave at myself in the mirror is not limited to me having a camera in my hand.

Thoughts on Haikou in General

So far I’m feeling really good about the move to Haikou. Here are some random thoughts about living here and how it compares to Suzhou (from my albeit 牛b perspective):

• It’s cheap. We are paying 500 RMB less per month for our new 144 sqm (1550 sq ft) apartment than we did for our black-mold infested 115 sqm place in Suzhou. Even taking out the fact that we lived in a pricey neighbourhood in Suzhou, we’re still paying less (per m/sq) than we did downtown Suzhou.
• It’s cheap. Yep, it’s cheap. We had thought that living on the island would drive prices up, and for somethings it does (electricity is nearly twice the price as in SZ). However, the day to day stuff is all generally much cheaper. Meat and veg, as an example, are about 25% cheaper. Coupling that with the ease of access to inexpensive fresh fruit and seafood (something that was a challenge to get in land-locked Suzhou), we’re saving money and eating better/healthier.
• It’s small(er). Haikou is a big city, and it’s roughly 2mil population beats out all but one of Canada’s cities; however, by Chinese standards, it’s a backwater city that was only made into a provincial capital in 1988. This makes it pretty easy to navigate. Additionally, like our old SZ neighbourhood, where we live now is a relatively new area of the city and so well designed (or getting there) and under-congested.
• It’s clean. This may have more to do with our specific location, but everywhere I’ve previously lived in China had the unfortunate issue of coating the apartment in dirty dust whenever the windows were left open for more than a few minutes. Our windows are open all the time here, and I’ve not noticed the usual layer of soot-like crap on everything yet. Again, this may be because we’re not near any main roads, and I imagine living downtown Haikou would be pretty similar.
• It’s dirty. Haikou, by and large, is much a more typical Chinese city than Suzhou SIP’s atypicalness. More horking, split-pant babies pissing in the street and garbage lying about than SIP; but I suppose about the same as downtown Suzhou.
• The people are friendly. When we moved from Dalian to Suzhou we were struck by how soft the manner of the people was. Northerners, and particularly Northeasterners tend to be a gruff bunch that don’t mince words, but the Suzhou ren have a slightly more reserved and even-temperness to them that we had grown used to in our time there. What we’re noticing about the people in Haikou is how genuinely friendly and content most people seem. Eager to help, happy to chat, and just a little bit more laid back about everything. Jah mon. As a comparison, I’ve met more of my neighbours in a week living here than I did in a year living at my old place.
• The people are stupid. This is more Maggie’s opinion than my own, but having had to listen to her whinging about it for the past two weeks, I’d be remiss for not including it. Maybe it’s just the slower pace of life, or just the change in educational demographics, but Haikou locals seem to operate differently than on the Mainland. From dealing with utilities to get things set up for our apartment, to setting up a bank account, to getting served at a restaurant; each step of the way had Maggie exclaiming, “Totally unprofessional.” Not an indicator of stupidity, but just as an illustration of how things are more casual here, when I went to register at the local police station we were told directly to come after 3pm, as from 12 to 3 the officer would be taking a nap.
• We have wildlife. Our community is full of trees populated with various birds. We’ve already had a little lizard make his way into the apartment and one on our laundry — both times scaring the crap out of Maggie. Then, the other night our screens became host to a bunch of flying beetles whose asses light up. There is also a large number of rats this size of some Chinese dogs.
• We miss our friends. We’re fortunate that we’re quickly being adopted by a great group of people here (that’s you Nicki and Erik!), but we really do miss our friends in Suzhou. I’ve made a lot of friends and acquaintances in my time in China, but our little tribe in Suzhou was much more akin to family than just friends. We knew it would be the toughest part of the move, and it continues to be.

By and large, while emotionally and physically taxing, and pretty expensive, we’re very happy with the move and slowly settling into our routine here.

Much more to come about living in Haikou and hopefully a bit of travel around the island when we find time. For now though, after being offline for a week (my longest stretch in half a decade), I have many many e-mails and a whole lot of work to catch up on.

After a hectic few days of packing, we said farewell to our gear Friday morning as it left on a truck destined to eventually (hopefully) meet up with us in Haikou. Judging what the costs would be for shipping our stuff was one part guess work and one part use of a bathroom scale — neither proved to be worth a damn.

We estimated our stuff to weigh in at, the high end, about 1000kg; which at 2.8RMB/kg worked out to just south of 3,000RMB. It caught us by surprise when using the moving company’s scale (the only scale that matters) our stuff hit a mark much closer to 2,000kg, or 5,300 RMB.

I’m only going to say this once and then I’m going to let it, finally, go — the moving company almost certainly ripped us off. I don’t know how they did it, as they let Maggie get on the scale to test its accuracy, and it was accurate with her. However, my amateur weighing abilities aside, there’s just no way that the majority of our flimsy cardboard boxes were comfortably supporting twice Maggie’s weight in our carefully curated possessions.

When all your stuff is on the truck and ready to go, they’ve pretty much got you by the bits. We, with very little reluctance, bent over and paid.

The rest of the day we spent getting our luggage sorted and doing last minute tidying up of our apartment to assure we didn’t arbitrarily cause complications and risk losing our renter’s deposit. Apartment “checkout” went smoothly, and we were able to spend our last night in Suzhou at our good friends’ apartment saying some tough goodbyes with massive burgers and plenty of Wild Turkey.

First thing Saturday morning we were out the door to meet the transportation arranged by the company we hired to ship our dog Button. As a bonus they agreed to take us along with Button to our awaiting flights in Shanghai. The first stop was to the shipping company’s hole-in-the-wall HQ where they weighed Button (which, suspiciously, was bang-on my estimate using the same scale that was nearly 50% wrong with our other stuff — seriously, last time, I’m letting it go).

We said our goodbyes to our pup and the driver took us over to Hong Qiao’s still shiny new Terminal 2. I had never been to the new terminal, and was sufficiently impressed having been through the grimy and cracked Terminal 1 a few years ago (incidentally, also for a Hainan trip).

Our flight wasn’t until the afternoon, but the time passed quickly. The flight went relatively smoothly, with a bit of fussiness (that’s loving parent speak for “full on meltdown”) from Casey just prior to take-off and landing.

After landing it took a bit of wandering and a few phone calls to figure out that while Button was on the same flight as us, because she was shipped as cargo she had been brought to the cargo facility about 2km away from the airport. Fortunately our Haikou airport pickup was awesome and he didn’t mind driving us over and picking Button up.

It was a long few minutes as we nervously waited for the cargo warehouse worker to locate Button. Shipping an animal via plane in China isn’t a very complicated process, but as with all things in this country, I can’t help but think there was a decent amount of gamble in the thing. Fortunately, and perhaps obviously, she was fine — if not a bit shaken.

Post-slobbery hellos we all jumped in the SUV and headed to our pre-arranged accommodations. As best I know (and please correct me if you know otherwise) China has a nation-wide policy of not allowing dogs in any hotels. As such, finding a place that would welcome Button was a challenge.

As with the dog shipper and airport pickup (and virtually everything else we purchase), Maggie had found a seller on Taobao that rented out apartments in Haikou for dirt cheap (80RMB or about $12/night) and they didn’t mind our furry one. What we had no way of knowing at the time was the shape of the place.

Slumdog Laowai

I’ve lived in some dives in my time in China, and am not unfamiliar with the country’s rougher raw-sewage smelling side. Where we’re staying, and where I’m currently writing this from, has been a new experience though. At the ass-end of an alley I can very nearly touch both sides of, the one-bedroom apartment is jammed into a clusterfuck of buildings whose planning can kindly be described as entirely slapdash.

Taking Button out this a.m. for her morning business led me on a jaunt through the neighbourhood — a collection of ironclad compounds, heaps of garbage and more stray dogs than downtown Athens — I had to walk for 15 minutes just to find a green patch for her to pee (she’s picky like that).

The location is a cultural tourist’s paradise, but I’m sort of over this side of China and even more so after days of packing and travel. That said, what it has done very well is reset my “bar”. Living in Suzhou’s rather ritzy SIP for the last 4 years has softened more than just my waist, and I have been trying to adjust my expectations for living in Haikou since we made the decision to move here. I’ve been, somewhat justifiably, worried that trying to find an apartment in Haikou would leave me comparing it all to the relatively sparkly sheen of things left behind.

The good news is that compared to where we’re staying at the moment, pretty much anything above a tent in a garbage dump would be an improvement. It really is the first place I’ve stayed that I could quite accurately call a slum.

Down by the Sea

Before anyone starts thinking we made a terrible, terrible mistake moving to this “paradise” (and shortly after Maggie started thinking just that); today we headed up to the part of town we are hoping to live in, and began to feel much much better about the move.

The area is called Haidian Island (海甸岛), and is where the only other people we “know” in the city live. It is an island in the northern area of the city, and right on the water (as islands tend to be).

There are a few things we’re looking for in a new neighbourhood — decent access to restaurants, markets and a good park to take Button and Casey to. I’m not sure about the markets, but from first glance it looks like Haidian Island is a good match.

We were warmed to the area by first visiting Baishamen (Ecological?) Park（白沙门生态园). The massive park comes complete with wide open grassy areas, some nice forested areas, a slightly rickety looking amusement park (does China have any other kind?) and a long sandy beach. I’ve been told the sea there isn’t great for swimming (and it’s far too chilly at the moment to attempt it), but for walking down the beach with a dog, it’s perfect.

So, tomorrow we officially begin our apartment hunt. We’ve been up and down Soufun.com and have several agents digging up keys and making appointments with landlords for us. It should be a busy few days, but we’re sort of growing accustomed to that.

And with this, a new chapter begins.

We’re not actually wearing matching hoodies — someone didn’t dress appropriately, and someone else ended up going in their t-shirt most of the afternoon.

The places I've lived, or will live, in China

After more than four and a half years, we’re leaving Suzhou.

So much has happened to me since moving here from Dalian in 2006: I got married, I started a new career path, I got a dog, I had a son. In my adult life I’ve not lived anywhere as long as I’ve lived in Suzhou.

But the time has come to move on to some place new, and what better place in this country than China’s vacation mecca — Hainan Island.

Many close to us know well that we’ve half-made plans to move down to Hainan several times over the past several years, but always changed our minds before things developed too far. First it was deciding to have a baby and wanting to be close to a decent hospital during the pregnancy that cancelled our plans to move south. Then it was not wanting to leave our wonderful support network right after having a baby that put the migration on hiatus. It is this reason that I’ve been reluctant to blog about the decision, fearful that I would have to retract this type of post for having changed our minds.

But now, our flights are bought, accommodation arranged, and with us 10-month veterans of parenthood, we feel we’re ready to embark on this long-anticipated next chapter of our lives. Nothing about the move is easy though — I suppose it never is. Since coming to Suzhou we’ve moved multiple times, having lived in five apartments straight across the city, and every time it was a pain in the ass. But this is the first time we’ve had to cart a fussy kid, a big furry dog and a long-collected pile of mostly useless (but strangely sentimental) stuff across more than 1600km to the southern most end of China.

Initially our plan was to head down to Hainan and sort out an apartment, come back to Suzhou and get our affairs in order, and then pull the trigger on the move. Time, money and a lack of enthusiasm for having to make multiple trips with a 10 month old inspired us to take a leap and just head down in one go.

When we arrive we’ve arranged to stay for a week in a small one-bedroom apartment rented per night like a hotel (but unlike hotels in China, we’re able to stay with our dog). From there we’ll hopefully find a place we like quickly and be able to move in before our stuff arrives via moving company at the end of the week. It may seem tight, but we have some flexibility in that we can stay longer in the apartment and our stuff can be stored at the moving company’s depot should either be needed.

We’ve yet to decide whether we’ll move to Sanya or Haikou, and will likely be looking at places in both cities, but are heavily leaning towards Haikou. What it lacks in beautiful beaches, it seems to make up for in being a proper city, and not just a scruffy third tier town with rows upon rows of newly built high-rises crowding its beach front. The only question mark is — and it’s a bit of a biggie — we’ve been to Haikou just once and then only for a short overnight stay, so really have no idea about the place.

Maggie @ Sanya Sunset

We’ve been to Sanya twice, once as mentioned to get married in ’07, and once as an anniversary/holiday trip in ’09. I really like the place and don’t think I’d have any problems living there, but with a kid in tow, practical considerations need to be heavily weighed.

Haikou, for what it’s worth sounds pretty great. It has some of the best environmental policies and the highest-rated air quality of any Chinese city. It’s new high-speed train makes Sanya’s beaches only 1.5 hours away, and bustling high-tech and tourism industries are helping the city to develop quickly. It also reportedly has a vibrant night-time culture — and man do I miss sitting on the street eating random bits of barbecued animal.

End of the day though, it’s a Chinese city, and I am keeping my expectations well in check. In fact, I’m viewing the move much more as a return to “common” China (trying hard to avoid the term “real” China). Life in Suzhou, specifically Suzhou’s SIP, is not indicative of what life is like in most places in China — even at the 2nd tier city level. I’m surrounded by good foreign restaurants, several foreign supermarkets; I can get an assortment of cheeses, deli meats, Canadian Moosehead beer, tex-mex takeout, my choice of delivery pizza, and an ever-expanding litany of other comfort things from home.

I’ve loved that about where I live. Ironically, it’s like a little island of normalcy in an otherwise challenging place, and I’m sure I would have wanted to head back to Canada long ago had I not found it. I am acutely aware that I’m giving most of that up in this move.

But I think I’m ready for it. What I’ve come to realize is that as much as being comfortable and having conveniences a button push away are great, they also create a lethargy in me. For better or worse, challenges push me to think harder and develop more. While I can’t think of a time in my life I wasn’t trying to make life easier (whether by making more money, living more comfortably, adding security, whatever), I also can’t think of anything I value in my life having come out of comfortable circumstance. Questing for them, perhaps, but once obtained, it all just sort of stales.

Palms at sunset in Sanya, Hainan

So I’m looking forward to the challenges of living in a new place, meeting new people, and exploring a large chunk of China that until now has escaped my visit. Living on Hainan, I cannot wait to get outdoors and explore the island, but I also cannot wait to use the place as a gateway to other areas in southern China I’ve long wanted to see. Kunming, Guangzhou, Hong Kong, Macau, Guilin and Vietnam are all places I hope to venture to from my new home base.

I’m truly looking forward to feeding my soul with new experiences and re-igniting my passion for the outdoors, travel and for China.

It was that need that brought me to China in the first place, and then, like now, the hardest part in the whole process is leaving friends behind. As an expat, it’s hard to make deep and lasting friendships, as more often than not someone ends up leaving before the relationship has really blossomed. I was lucky here in Suzhou to have made some incredible friends that have not just left me with great memories, but have infused the best parts of themselves into my character and made me a much better person for having known them.

The great part about friendships like that is you know it’s never goodbye, only see you later. And while I know that relationships inevitably suffer from an inverse-square law, I also know that the moment that we again find ourselves in the same place it will be as if little or no time has passed.

And so, in a little more than two weeks we’ll say 再见 to our life in Suzhou and begin something new in Hainan.

We’ve been talking about moving for quite a while now, and with our lease up next month, it was time to either piss or get off the pot… alright, there was no pots, and I wouldn’t piss in one anyway – but yeah, it was time to make a decision.

Our current place is right downtown, and the centrality of it was a huge deterrent for me wanting to move. As little as I actually get out, it is nice being two blocks from Shi Quan Jie, Suzhou’s most active bar street.

I also really like our neighborhood. We are in a modest but nice two-bedroom apartment that is in a reasonably nice community. However, when you take two steps outside the community into the alleyway our apartment backs onto and you are thrown back half a century into where the “other half” lives – and I like it.

There’s just something inherently cool about cheap Lanzhou la mian, late night majiang, listening to the canter of the whores coming home at 2 a.m., and walking by folks who are unabashedly brushing their teeth or washing their hair in the lane way. It keeps it real, yo.

Plus, there’s an element of nature here too. Not only is our little compound swelling with plant-life and air full of jasmine and osmanthus, but our complex backs onto the southern end of the large canal that surrounds the city. The canal bank hosts a nice park that holds more trees than I’ve seen elsewhere in the city proper.

It’s not a bad place to live.

Alas, as close as it is to downtown, it isn’t close to Maggie’s yoga studio, and as she’s the one who has to trek through the hectic Suzhou traffic four times a day in what will soon be furnace-like temperatures on a bus that is 4x too full, she’s got some pull in the decision.

But don’t get me wrong – I’m keen on moving too. We’re moving out to Suzhou Singapore Industrial Park (SIP) – the up-scale expat end of town. My new community is directly across the street from a Starbucks, and is virtually surrounded by Western restaurants and supermarkets selling everything that will make me question if I’m even in China anymore.

What’s more, we’ve found an awesome apartment that suits our needs perfectly.

We met with the realtor on Saturday, essentially on a whim, knowing we had to get the apartment hunting started eventually.

The place we had arranged to see was in the same large community as a good friend of mine lives in, so I had some idea what it might look like. Little did I know it would be two floors down from him in the exact same building – coincidences abound in this country.

I was pretty much sold on the place within two minutes of walking into it. It’s a relatively large place – two bedrooms + an office, two bathrooms, a nice living room with lots of sunlight and – get this – a backyard!

With little Addie now firmly entrenched in our lives, the yard was the clincher. We were hoping of our new place to provide us with at least a balcony she could get out and get some fresh air on, but to have an, albeit small, yard to run out into completely exceeded our expectations.

So, I’ll be sad to leave this place. Since moving in last January I’ve become quite attached to it. However, as this is the 24th place I’ve called “home” in my life, I’m no stranger to moving and am certainly looking forward to being able to have a proper BBQ.

As mentioned, we move in at the end of June. I’ll be posting video and photos of the place then, and may finally deliver on posting video of my neighborhood here before we leave. Any new neighbours out in SIP, get in touch and we’ll grab a cheap Tiger beer at Mr. Pizza’s.