Apart-mental (cute or corny?)

Sorry for the lack of posts in the past few days, but life in China can be rather hectic and the internet in China can be rather fickle . But I'll save the internet story for another post. First let me tell you about the hell that was getting an apartment. It's a long one, so pour yourself a glass of something warm and dig in.
Nora, my shanghai-flatmate-to-be and old friend from college, planned to arrive on Tuesday, the 24th of September. I arrived in Shanghai almost a full week earlier, so I looked at 6 or 7 different apartments before she arrived. Some were terrible, one claimed to be a two bedroom but really had a small bedroom and a linen closet, but even the better ones had one or two major flaws. Then I found the apartment I knew we were going to live in. It was perfect and the rent was low from what I had seen (4,500 RMB per month between the two of us. That's just around 350 a month per person). It's location was perfect, a two-minute walk from the metro, the flat was huge and the bedrooms were great. I set up a meeting to sign the contract with the landlord for the Friday after Nora arrived. The Chinese have this custom with rent where you pay a one month deposit and the first two months rent up front. On top of that, the realty agent gets a 36% cut of one's month rent from both the landlord and the tenants. So this meant we would have to bone up about 8,000 RMB a piece. In America we call this number just over one thousand US dollars. Now, I didn't have 1,000 USD, and it turns out Nora didn't either. Before Nora arrived, I was smart enough to ask for a cash advance from my company, EF. My boss told me I would have an EF ATM card by Tuesday and 8,000 RMB in the account by Thursday. This amount would be deducted from my subsequent three paychecks, in sums of 3,000, 3,000, and 2,000, respectively. This all sounded good, but my card had not come by Wednesday. And then on Thursday my DOS had to get in touch with the EF China center to confirm my request would go through. They assured her it would and that my card would be at my school on Friday morning. In the meantime, I had been trying to figure out a way to get Nora 8,000 RMB, even before she arrived. The cash advances take three days to process, and you need to have submitted a new hire form before you could even request one. This meant that Nora could not get one in time. Eventually Nora's DOS, Benson, says that he will either front her the money or have their school give her a personal loan. Keep in mind that Benson had not even met Nora at this point. Needless to say, Benson is the coolest guy in the world. I want him to be my new dad.
Thursday night is the last night of my 3-day, 25-hour training session, so Nora meets up with me and a few of my international employees/fellow trainees and we all proceed to get sloshed. The night somehow ends up with me getting hammered, heading to another bar with a brit from my training session named Lottie, and then making my way to a table with 3 old Chinese businessmen. They speak OK English; I speak OK Chinese; we end up taking whiskey shots for an hour or so and singing songs. Lottie enjoys the show, I'm sure, but at this point I am having too much of a blast with these Chinese business men to care. By the end of the night they are calling me DiDi, an affectionate term for little brother, and I black out somewhere around there and wind up back in my hotel room bed (Side note: It turns out I took a cab home, leaving the bike which my boss lent to me at the Metro station. It goes without saying that it was promptly stolen). I wake up the next morning with one of the worst hangovers of my life, but I'm not too worried because Nora and I both have our moneys set up. We head to Nora's EF school that morning to get Nora's cash and my cash card. We arrive and Nora gets a fat wad of cash from Benson, and she gives a signature on a contract saying she will pay back EF as soon as she gets her paycheck. At this point I am already starving and hungover all at once, making me insanely miserable. There was some confusion about my card, delaying us about an hour, until the local staff realized it was in the front office the whole time. We've already lost too much time, so Nora and I just jump into a cab headed towards the realtor's without eating anything. I figure it will be an hour and a half tops until we are all done. I am very wrong.
We arrive at the realtor's a little early to find the landlady of our building already waiting. I head off the the bank to get my cash, leaving Nora to chat with her. After spending half an hour at the bank trying to figure out why my card won't work, I call my supervisor and she tells me she'll call up the center and ask what's going on. The whole time my stomach is yelling obscene things at me for putting it through such hardship. Meanwhile, I try another bank with no success. I even had a realtor with me for each visit, he wanted this thing done with promptly too, but both banks told us the card wasn't activated. Eventually my boss gets back to me to tell me that, even though the forms were submitted on time for my cash advance, they were never processed. She then tells me I will have the 8,000 RMB in three business days. This would not be so horrible, except for the fact that this the Friday before "Golden Week." The Golden Week is a week long national holiday in China where EVERYONE takes off from work and goes to vacation somewhere. This meant I wouldn't be able to get my money for another 13 days or so. I finally head back to the realtor's, a good hour later then I left, and I feel like I am about to pass out from hunger/my splitting headache. After a lengthy discussion (read: about an hour) with the landlady, using one of my Chinese coworkers on the cell phone as a translator, I finally convince her to agree to a deal. We will pay her one month's rent instead of three, as well as her end of the realtor's fee, and then pay three months rent next paycheck, less said realtor's fee. I am amazed that she is even willing to put up with us at this point, but it turns out she is an insanely sweet lady. There was one catch, though. For her to trust that we weren't going to skimp her, she wanted to go see my company's new building, meet the Chinese staff, and have me sign a written contract agreeing to pay her as soon as I got my cash advance. At the sound of this further hurdle I can almost literally feel my stomach acids eating away at the lining in my gut. I figure it will be another hour, at least, before we are all done. Luckily, the realtor and I had been making small talk in between bank visits and he knows I am starving. He drops some hints that I hadn't eaten in the four or five hours it had taken for us to deal with this whole shindig, so she agrees we would go to lunch first. We ate at a chain called "Steak King," where she got a Chinese dish and I got pan fried chicken in a black pepper sauce.
I don't know how much this had to do with my voracious appetite, but that chicken was some of the best I have ever tasted. It really was delicious. The landlady and I wound up talking for about an hour about life, her family, my family, the differences between Chinese and American culture, and all of that kind of great stuff. Keep in mind that she doesn't even speak a word of Chinese, so it was much like a parent talking to a 7 year old with a learning disability. After the awesome meal, which she demanded she pay for!, we made our way to my new work building and she was pleased with it. I thanked her a million times for being so understanding, but she just kept saying, "don't worry about it. We are friends now." After having this lady feed me and then having say something like that, I was about ready to kiss her. Nora and I moved in that night and have been settling in since. that alone has been a very interesting experience, but I'll move onto that in the next post, sometime this week.