last night, jon said during a phone call which cost me a Ridiculous Amount of Money, wah your room not bad ah - got parquet floor!
(considering that most electronic products come from india and china, you'd expect their telecommunication networks and therefore rates not to be so expensive, but maybe it's because the himalayas are in the way. and he'd spent another Ridiculous Amount of Money calling me the past two days so it was alright, give and take.)
i rolled my eyes to myself and said, then you should see the floor just where it connects to the door frame of the bathroom door. if we're not careful when we shower, water seeps out under the bathroom door, and the floor peels.
one concludes that it's plywood or some synthetic material (which is more likely) manufactured to look like parquet, because it doesn't lie flat anymore, at the part where it connects to the door frame of the bathroom door.
thankfully, we haven't been able to look beneath the floor yet. i'll let you know if it ever gets to that state. and, like me, i don't think you're looking forward to what it looks like down there.
probably just concrete lah, and it's too dry for mold to form from the wet.
but you never know.
cockroach eggs, perhaps. they love it here, we've already killed too many to ever be able to look another one in the eye.
***
today marks the second week of my stay in beijing, and i still haven't decided which i dislike more: the smell of cigarette smoke, or the smell of urine and bleach.
i think everybody here either smokes reds or some unknown to singapore, but extremely potent, local brand. some professors even smoke in their offices, i almost suffocated to death the first day we reported to school because no windows were open in the office of the professor we were talking to, and he was smoking like a chimney, extinguishing the butts in a close-to-overflowing ashtray.
moreover, the smell of stale cigarette smoke clings to clothes like you can't imagine; in winter i don't think anybody does washing on a regular basis, much less bothers to wear fresh clothes, and the smell lingers, until it becomes a part of you, proclaiming to all you meet that you're a smoker. and when you speak your breath is sour, horrid, evil. the smell gives me a headache and makes me want to cover my nose but it's everywhere, as are cigarette butts. taxi drivers, door-to-door salesmen, professors, students, bus drivers, passengers on the bus - there's something about whatever they're smoking.
toilets here are clean, but the smell is a whole new story altogether. there is nothing like it. what's more, when we went to the forbidden palace last sunday, we paid one yuan (twenty cents) to use what still ranks number one on our list of horriblest toilet encounters. putrid, now that's an appropriate word for the smell. signs on the doors of the port-a-loos proclaimed that the toilets would flush with some 'special water,' meant to disinfect or some such nonsense, which turned out to be brown in colour and the exact same colour as excrement.
you really don't have to read on if you're feeling queasy.
but every cloud has a silver lining, and i'm glad that the toilets have doors, that they're squatting toilets and the flush is one which you step on; that they can usually be found easily whenever you need one, and, lastly, even though it makes the smell infinitely worse, that some poor soul (who ought to be blessed) cleans the toilets with bleach.
except for the port-a-loos at the forbidden palace, perhaps. and i don't blame them. the toilets within the palace itself are okay, though.
and if these smells already assail my nose now, in winter, one can only imagine what it'll be like in summer. stay tuned.
***
i didn't think our forbidden palace experience was worth it at all. some of the main attractions were under rennovation, and to top it all off, it was bitterly cold. thermometers here (and the world over, i'm sure) never seem to register the wind chill.
we had lunch at the only place where we could get lunch. i actually watched them prepare it - they cooked some noodles in a vast pot of some stock or other, drained them, put them in a bowl and dumped a very dodgy looking brown sauce on top, which turned out to be black bean paste mixed with i don't want to know what.
it didn't help that the place where we had to eat made me feel uncomfortable. maybe it was just the cold, or the fact that it gave off the air of a derelict hawker centre, with food cooked by people who knew that you had no other choice but to eat whatever they gave you or starve.
needless to say, i didn't finish my lunch that day.
***
dodgy is a very useful word, and it sits nicely in the mouth when you say it. dod-gy. we've been using it at every available opportunity, to describe badly shot mtvs, the kind where the wind always seems to be blowing in the right direction so the too-fair heroine's hair blows away from her face (whenever i try to get my hair blowing in the wind it gets tangled), to the meatballs in school - definitely dodgy. but i've tried them, and they're not half-bad.
we went to sing ktv with our university classmates yesterday (where jolie pointed out the dodginess of certain mtvs), and we chose 我愿意. guess what, it looks like quents was right after all.
***
the picture at the bottom left is of a santa claus soft toy i saw lodged between the cupboard and the wall when i stood on the chair to try and get the entire room in one shot. the picture at the bottom right is of the view from my room at night. quite lovely, really. and it also overlooks the main road, so i wake up and am kept awake by the honking of car horns as early as 0630.
(considering that most electronic products come from india and china, you'd expect their telecommunication networks and therefore rates not to be so expensive, but maybe it's because the himalayas are in the way. and he'd spent another Ridiculous Amount of Money calling me the past two days so it was alright, give and take.)
i rolled my eyes to myself and said, then you should see the floor just where it connects to the door frame of the bathroom door. if we're not careful when we shower, water seeps out under the bathroom door, and the floor peels.
one concludes that it's plywood or some synthetic material (which is more likely) manufactured to look like parquet, because it doesn't lie flat anymore, at the part where it connects to the door frame of the bathroom door.
thankfully, we haven't been able to look beneath the floor yet. i'll let you know if it ever gets to that state. and, like me, i don't think you're looking forward to what it looks like down there.
probably just concrete lah, and it's too dry for mold to form from the wet.
but you never know.
cockroach eggs, perhaps. they love it here, we've already killed too many to ever be able to look another one in the eye.
***
today marks the second week of my stay in beijing, and i still haven't decided which i dislike more: the smell of cigarette smoke, or the smell of urine and bleach.
i think everybody here either smokes reds or some unknown to singapore, but extremely potent, local brand. some professors even smoke in their offices, i almost suffocated to death the first day we reported to school because no windows were open in the office of the professor we were talking to, and he was smoking like a chimney, extinguishing the butts in a close-to-overflowing ashtray.
moreover, the smell of stale cigarette smoke clings to clothes like you can't imagine; in winter i don't think anybody does washing on a regular basis, much less bothers to wear fresh clothes, and the smell lingers, until it becomes a part of you, proclaiming to all you meet that you're a smoker. and when you speak your breath is sour, horrid, evil. the smell gives me a headache and makes me want to cover my nose but it's everywhere, as are cigarette butts. taxi drivers, door-to-door salesmen, professors, students, bus drivers, passengers on the bus - there's something about whatever they're smoking.
toilets here are clean, but the smell is a whole new story altogether. there is nothing like it. what's more, when we went to the forbidden palace last sunday, we paid one yuan (twenty cents) to use what still ranks number one on our list of horriblest toilet encounters. putrid, now that's an appropriate word for the smell. signs on the doors of the port-a-loos proclaimed that the toilets would flush with some 'special water,' meant to disinfect or some such nonsense, which turned out to be brown in colour and the exact same colour as excrement.
you really don't have to read on if you're feeling queasy.
but every cloud has a silver lining, and i'm glad that the toilets have doors, that they're squatting toilets and the flush is one which you step on; that they can usually be found easily whenever you need one, and, lastly, even though it makes the smell infinitely worse, that some poor soul (who ought to be blessed) cleans the toilets with bleach.
except for the port-a-loos at the forbidden palace, perhaps. and i don't blame them. the toilets within the palace itself are okay, though.
and if these smells already assail my nose now, in winter, one can only imagine what it'll be like in summer. stay tuned.
***
i didn't think our forbidden palace experience was worth it at all. some of the main attractions were under rennovation, and to top it all off, it was bitterly cold. thermometers here (and the world over, i'm sure) never seem to register the wind chill.
we had lunch at the only place where we could get lunch. i actually watched them prepare it - they cooked some noodles in a vast pot of some stock or other, drained them, put them in a bowl and dumped a very dodgy looking brown sauce on top, which turned out to be black bean paste mixed with i don't want to know what.
it didn't help that the place where we had to eat made me feel uncomfortable. maybe it was just the cold, or the fact that it gave off the air of a derelict hawker centre, with food cooked by people who knew that you had no other choice but to eat whatever they gave you or starve.
needless to say, i didn't finish my lunch that day.
***
dodgy is a very useful word, and it sits nicely in the mouth when you say it. dod-gy. we've been using it at every available opportunity, to describe badly shot mtvs, the kind where the wind always seems to be blowing in the right direction so the too-fair heroine's hair blows away from her face (whenever i try to get my hair blowing in the wind it gets tangled), to the meatballs in school - definitely dodgy. but i've tried them, and they're not half-bad.
we went to sing ktv with our university classmates yesterday (where jolie pointed out the dodginess of certain mtvs), and we chose 我愿意. guess what, it looks like quents was right after all.
***
the picture at the bottom left is of a santa claus soft toy i saw lodged between the cupboard and the wall when i stood on the chair to try and get the entire room in one shot. the picture at the bottom right is of the view from my room at night. quite lovely, really. and it also overlooks the main road, so i wake up and am kept awake by the honking of car horns as early as 0630.
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