The Smallest, Most Important Room

We finally have a few good pictures of our apartment for you to enjoy! We finally finished decorating our bathroom, so we are prepared to show you what it looks like. First of all, this picture on the left give you an idea of what things looked like before all the renovation. Our bathrooms are the smallest rooms in the whole apartment and yet house some of the most vital living assistants. In a room that might be tinier than many walk-in closets we've seen in America, there is the washer for clothes, the sink, the toilet, shower, AND household hot-water heater. Please don't feel sorry for us - this is common to most every apartment here in China

The end of August and beginning of this month they tore EVERYTHING out of this bathroom and retiled the walls and ceiling, covered all piping, and put in an entirely new sink (with cabinets underneath!) and a completely new toilet. It has a very nice feeling of being new, clean, and now that we've decorated it - uniquely ours. Now I'm sure as most of you look at this it may seem a bit odd, so let us explain a few things. First of all, the entire bathroom is one big drain. When the clothes washer is done with the water it used to wash, it just dumps it out the bottom and makes its way to the drain right behind the toilet (you can't see it). The shower, located right beside the toilet - the shower head is right above the picture cut-off - drains into that same place. All of this makes it almost inconceivable to put a bathroom mat anywhere, but also makes cleaning pretty easy! The placement of the toilet and shower also means that if one of us were ever a bit ticked off at our spouse, it might be quite a temptation to water them down while they are "taking care of business"! I mean, hey, killing two birds with one stone, right?!

We also wanted to add a picture of our apartment building. Because of the large population in China, most cities with few exceptions offer only apartment complexes as housing. They are up everywhere and they all practically look the same. Everybody lives in them, including the city mayor who lives 3 feet across the hall from us. Our building is designated only for foreigners and special Chinese families. There are about 8 foreigners including ourselves, our friends the Edminsons, a man from South Africa, a girl from the Phillipines, and two other Americans we are getting to know. Although the Chinese may squeeze many people into one building, we are very impressed at how much they care for their beautiful parks and outdoor sitting areas. In the photo below you can see that just outside our apartment is a small grassy area with tables, seats, benches, and at night there are kids playing around and making (mostly) pleasant noise. There isn't much space for cars seeing as this idea of parking garages or parking spaces is relatively new here. We live on the second floor, right side, so you can see our darkened patio window between the trees in the lawn. This is where we hang our clothes out to dry and keep all our cleaning materials. Each apartment has one A/C unit and all of Karamay is heated by a city-wide central heating system that we haven't yet figured out, but will soon once winter rolls around. According to what we've heard, some dude somewhere just makes a decision and we'll come home to an excessively heated home someday.Well, I think that's about it for us for now. School has been going well and we finally got our computer hooked up at the apartment so if you want to get our AIM screenname or local Dallas phone number (isn't technology crazy?) just shoot us an e-mail. We're both pretty much over our sickness with a few traces left behind. Josh got a haircut yesterday, which is an adventure we'll have to save for another blog. Tiff is learning to knit (so we can have scarves this winter!) and is working overtime to make some good lessons for her kindergarteners. We hope all is well with you and we "think" of you all often.