My Room
My room is really, really nice. It’s sort of like living in a hotel – we are provided with a host of toiletries in the bathroom (even a toothbrush!), a kettle to boil water, a refrigerator, a teacup and tea, a trashcan that gets emptied every day, our own shower that gets cleaned every day, towels that get replaced every day, and bed linens that will presumably 
be replaced every week or so. This is really amazing – I haven’t had a long-term living situation where this much was done for me since I left home for college (well, I guess the summer I spent at home when I worked at Eduware, the software company of Edu-torture, might count – and then, of course, I not only had free food and clean towels, but got to see my family every day, a pretty big plus in my book). I don’t actually know if they make the beds for you here, since I’ve woken up early enough every day so far to just make my own bed, but I bet they do. [EDIT: they do, just messily.] It’s true that the walls are a little dirty, my kettle is a little rusty, my bathroom needs to be evacuated of all contents except me and my shampoo/ conditioner/ body wash whenever I take a shower, because the tiny bathroom literally is my shower stall, with a head mounted in a corner on the wall and a drain in 
the middle of the floor which never fully dries, and everything smells faintly of cigarette smoke [EDIT:or sewage, a smell which arises powerfully from the toilet and shower drain every other day or so for a few hours], but I am really just incredibly impressed with how nice the accommodations are for us by Chinese standards. A couple of students have been complaining about, among other things, the scratchiness of the towels, and are looking for places to buy nicer ones, which strikes me as entirely unnecessary. If scratchy towels that get replaced with clean ones for you every day are all you have to complain about, you’re doing pretty well. Please, people. I think we’ll survive.
posted by Kelly @ 6:22 下午
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