apartment found

First, let me apologize for the lack of pictures in this blog. The last few days since I arrived have been a craze of shopping trips, house-hunting trips, and staff meetings. I have not had the time to slow down, stop, and take pictures of the actual city and campus. I will spend some time tomorrow morning taking pictures of the school and hopefully upload them in my next post.

We found a place! My CITE-buddy and I have decided to share an apartment. Unfortunately, the prices of all the apartments have been jacked up this year, but we found a nice 3-bedroom place for a somewhat reasonable price. We signed on a 1-year lease, and the landlord was kind enough to let us pay only a portion of the usual deposit amount until payday hits (as we pretty much whipped out all our cash on hand and will have to be super frugal for the next 3 weeks). We should be moving in within next week and saying bye-bye to the school apartments for a while. (Speaking of the school apartments, it really was not fun when the school started blasting the Chinese and Canadian national anthems repeatedly all across campus this morning at 7am.)

I am very thankful we found a place we like, and hopefully we won't find too many bugs in the apartment during our stay (we already discovered a small cockroach that lives behind the TV). Ants are unavoidable here in Wuhan even on the 5th floor, but at least they're small ants, unlike the flying ones I have outside my house back in Vancouver. Now that I'm on the topic of bugs, I can say that there must be about a trillion crickets that live on campus. They are SO LOUD at night it is unbelievable. Flies and mosquitoes are a given; so are beetles and frogs. This must be because of the huge swampy ponds on campus. I can't believe I forgot to bring insect repellent with me from Vancouver, I will be having to buy myself a bug zapper very soon.