Before we moved to China, I spent 7 days there meeting the previous principal of the school. One of my tasks was to find an apartment for my family. My future secretary, whose English was pretty good, toured me around 8 or 9 apartments, over 2 days, before we found one that I thought my wife would approve of.
Walking through a few of these places, my secretary remarked, “I don’t like the decorations.”
I thought this was an odd statement, since we would be moving in with our own ‘decorations’. I didn’t understand what she meant until months later. As it turns out, when you buy an apartment in China, the structural walls are the only thing in place. Nothing else. A drain in the kitchen area, and one drain in the bathroom areas.
Almost every apartment I went into in China had a step up to hide the fact that the plumbing for the sink, toilet, and shower all had to be put in after purchase, and had to be directed to a single drain pipe. In fact, there could often be odour issues in bathrooms, with little room for the bathtub drain to have a water trap to protect against gases (and smell) coming up the pipe. When we went on holidays, I’d leave water in our tub and sink to protect against this.
When my secretary talked about not liking the decorations, she was literally talking about the design of the apartment, where the walls and doors were, how the apartment was laid out. You could go into two apartments side-by-side, or even one floor above, in a building and the layout could be completely different.
One apartment we went to had a completely enclosed kitchen with two doors on either end to get to the living room and dining room. Another apartment had a bathroom with access only from the kitchen. I thought I was opening a pantry when I opened the bathroom door. Both of these were places where my secretary didn’t like the decorations. And I didn’t like the layout. Same thing, except what I didn’t know was that the layout was a design (or decoration) feature that the first owner chose, not something the builder did. In this way, the word ‘decorations’ made a lot more sense.
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Related post on my Pair-a-Dimes blog: Slowly by Slowly.
