We finally moved into our new apartment and it is fantastic! We have two bedrooms, a good sized kitchen, and a nice, big living room. We have views of the Pacific on one side and a small view of the mountains on the other. Even with the fake wood flooring, the place is really nice. The commute is pretty easy, too. This apartment is on campus, and it takes us less than five minutes to walk to our classrooms. There are people in America who walk further to get to their driveways. And best of all, we have internet access! I am writing this post in our new home, not in that smoky PC cafe we used to frequent. Our new flat has as much living space as most of our friends' Washington DC apartments, but it lacks many typical, American luxuries. A few examples: * Our shower head lacks a shower stall. After we shower, we have to squeegee the bathroom floor so that our socks don't get wet when we use the facilities. * We have our own washing machine, but it is a double cylinder model that requires us to switch the clothes back and forth with each rinse cycle. The machine's waste-water hose leads directly into the drain on the bathroom floor, but we have to remove it when we shower, and for our post-shower squeegeeing. * We cook on a range connected to a gas tank that sits in a cupboard. When we run out of gas, we will have to call the gas company and have them deliver another one. Hopefully we won't run out mid-stir-fry. * We have a small electric oven that we inherited from another teacher when he moved back to Australia. It can only handle a half-sized loaf of bread. We make full recipes, and then bake them in two batches. So far, the results have been fantastic. We brought two half-Challahs to an expat barbeque last night. They lasted about ten minutes. After six months in China, we don't even think about our lack of a shower stall or clothes dryer. The luxuries we really missed were American news and American radio. At least we missed them until we got our internet connection. Now we can get our daily fix.