The Dorm

Why haven't I been posting? Because I've been studying. Hard. Every day. All day. It was starting to drive me over the edge, so I took a break for some retail therapy. Today I bought a digital camera. I should have bought one in the US as so many folks advised, but no, I can't do it the easy way. I had to buy it here. Something of a struggle, and all I could find were really recent models with all the bells and whistles that I definitely don't need. I bought the simplest thing I could find and got them to knock $90 off the price and throw in a 4G memory card. Fortunately, it's very simple to figure out, which is a good thing because the user manual is in Chinese. I hate reading manuals anyway.

I have gotten a few questions about the dorm, so I'm posting pictures. The picture above is a 10x12 room and the picture below is a 5x5 shower/toilet room. There is a very small entry. That's it. The plumbing in the bathroom leaks constantly, so the orange bowl is there to catch some of the water. The leaks on the other side of the bathroom go down the drain. Unless the bathroom door is closed, the constant dripping is something like the Chinese Water Torture. It's the hot water that is leaking, so long hot showers are not possible.


If you look closely, you will notice that the handle of the toilet is hanging a bit outside the toilet tank. This is because the handle is tied on and then the rest of the mechanism is tied to the flange in the toilet. I did this when the toilet handle fell off one day a few weeks ago. I used several pieces of dental floss. Used dental floss of course, because although I have seen dental floss here, so far I haven't seen my brand.


There is really no point in asking the management to fix things here. Not only is the guy in charge an extremely unpleasant person, he has already "fixed" the plumbing twice. When I requested a mattress that wasn't broken (the mattress is too long for the bed frame, so it was forced in and the mattress buckled in the process), his response was an angry tirade and then a refusal. After a few nights, I realized that the lumps were only at the head of the bed, so now I sleep upside down.

This room is much nicer than the previous two rooms I was in, really not bad at all. It's just that it's some new problem every day. Yesterday, there was no water, and since the hot water heater is drained by the leaky plumbing, it got extremely hot and smoky after the water was shut off. I was afraid it was going to catch on fire. Today, the curtain rod, which was barely connected, fell off and it took awhile to reattach it. In the process, I found a piece of my chair which had broken off last week. Be warned: if you are considering going to school at
Shandong Normal University in Jinan and you have seen the pictures of the foreign students dormitory posted on their website, you might be somewhat disappointed.