We found an apartment!

First I'm going to start with our journey to Huainan. We took a really nice high speed train from Shanghai to Bengbu. It was the nicest train I've ever been on and the bathroom was at least twice the size of an airplane bathroom. After seeing Huainan now I can definitely say that I can live here. But on our way from Bengbu (the city our train dropped us off at), I was a little worried. Bengbu is not the nicest place on earth. I'm not even sure why the high speed train even goes to Bengbu and not Huainan but it did. I didn't get any pictures of Bengbu because I was too concerned with trying not to die during the car ride. I wasn't really shocked at the driving in Shanghai but it appears to be worse in the smaller cities because there is less traffic so there's more space to "manuver". Anyways, Bengbu is pretty crappy. Everything is run down, people live/work on the side of the road selling whatever they can. Roosters walk around freely until someone catches them for butchering. Stuff like that! Huainan is much more civilized, but you can still get a rooster butchered on the side of the road if you please. :)

We went apartment hunting with Christine Wang, a representative from Santa Fe Relocation. She had very broken English, but she was sweet and we were able to communicate well enough. Smudgie is definitely allowed to live with us and I even saw a few pet dogs being walked by people on our various tours. At first I was kind of worried because the first apartment we went to see was in a pretty crappy neighborhood. Not scary, but just dirty. There was a fruit stand nearby and I was like "Oh cool, a fruit stand!" and then I looked to the right and there were pieces of smashed fruit and trash all over the ground and it smelled really bad. Inside the apartment community there were some walls with shards of glass stuck into the top of the cement to prevent people from jumping over them. I guess they had good security! Here's a couple pictures of the inside of the apartment:

We saw 7 different apartments and after that first one, the apartments got a lot nicer on the inside. (phew!) So our decision basically came down to a couple of things: location, how nice the buildings looked on the outside, and what floor the apartment was on. I'm not going to post all the pictures I took because there are too many but I'll post the pictures of the one we picked. It's a beauty!

It's on the first floor, which we were really happy about for Smudgie. And the community had a nice little wall around it and it's close to everything without being right in the middle of everything. Plus just look at how gorgeous it is! We're very excited.

Bonus Story:

We got back from our apartment hunt at about 12 noon. We just wanted to relax a little bit before eating lunch so we went up to the room until about 12:30 then went down to the hotel lobby for the buffet lunch. It was mobbed! There were so many people we decided to come back later since the sign said that lunch was open until 2:00. So we went back down at 1:00 and everyone was gone. The employees were cleaning up! That was dumb, so we thought we'd order room service since the little brochure in our room said room service was 24 hours. Adam called and apparently they only had dumplings. Maybe they have 24 hour room service but they have an extremely limited menu. So we decided to go on our first adventure. We walked down the street until we found a Chinese restaurant, knowing that nobody there would speak English and we'd probably have to just point at pictures on the menu. Now, I know how to say "Hello" and "Two, please" in Chinese, but I didn't want them to think I speak anymore than that so we walk in the door and I go "Hi!" and the waitress says "Hello!" and we all start laughing because we know this is going to be interesting. The waitress opens the menu and there are no pictures. Just Chinese characters. Luckily, the waitress does know a few English words so we were able to order coca-cola and then Adam said "rice?" and she shows us the section where the rice dishes are and we just point to one and hope that it's good. It turned out to be rice, with some tiny bits of pork and something else in there and it was good. So we had a successful outing. There was a group of women in the corner looking at us and texting on their phones and that was pretty funny. I wish I still had my Chinese phrasebook. That would have been so much easier. But it was fun anyways.