First few full days in Xuzhou

The next day I was still pretty out of it but I had to go through training and all that. Before we went to training, Pat and I went to the market across the street and got a bunch of cleaning supplies. We spent a good 6 hours cleaning our apartment and still didn't get to the bathroom. The office cabinet in my room was covered in something. It was everywhere, even in the drawers. I had to scrub it with a brush! We were so tired of cleaning that we didn't wipe the bleach off the floor so the floor is kind of weird since there is so much bleach everywhere.

Our toilet seat was cracked so that was not fun. When you sat down to go to the bathroom you had shards of plastic digging into you. All the seats here are plastic. The repair man said that we should put something under the seat for extra support. Then he said something in Chinese that I am assuming was a fat joke towards Pat and I. We can't flush toilet paper; we have to put it in the trash can so that makes the bathroom smell even worse than it originally would.

Our kitchen had a horrible smell in it that we can't figure out. We just poured a bunch of bleach in the cabinet that it is coming from hoping that would kill whatever it was. We are were going to hire a cleaning lady. They are about $2/hour so we figured we would do that once a week or two. We planned on not cooking here because we would have to buy a tank of propane for our stove and that would be a waste of money for just 1 1/2 months.

Our laundry machine was a piece of junk. There are no dryers here first off. That's not too bad but the washer was basically a tub that will spin the water around for you. The bad part was that there is no rinse or spin cycle. So we loaded the washer with clothes, soap, and water from a hose. We let that move around for a while then drained the water. We then put more water in and let it move around some more. Drain while putting more water in to rinse some. I eventually ended up hand rinsing all the clothes and putting them in the spinner. The spinner only holds 2 pairs of jeans at a time so it took about an hour to do one load of laundry and I did most of the work; the machine helped a little.

Pictures of our apartment.