The Roommate

When you meet someone new, both parties, generally speaking, try their darnedest to be nice to each other. This was the case with our roommate Dave. He seemed to be very nice and we were all getting along quite well. This changed a couple weeks after moving in.

I usually got up for work at about 6:30 and immediately got into the shower. One morning as I was walking to the bathroom completely naked except for my towel a strange person walks out of the bathroom. Dave had started bringing guys home from the gay bar. He never asked us if it was okay if someone stayed over. I didn't have a problem with it but I wasn't not able to lock my room in case one of these guys decided to rifle through my belongings.

He would constantly invite us out to dinner with his friends. Now, this is a nice gesture but none of his friends spoke English and we don't speak much Chinese at all. During the dinners we had a semi-good time but we were always then invited to these people's houses which I wasn't up for. Eventually I got tired of having dinner with older men that I didn't speak the same language as and thanked Dave for the invite but that I would have to pass. He immediately started getting cranky with me about how I can only experience the culture if I hang out with locals and on and on and on. I appreciated the invites but I didn't sign up for Dave to be my life coach or political science teacher.

One night Dave asked if he could have some friends over for some drinks. Patrick and I said fine but that we had to work in the morning so him and his friends would have to be quiet after we went to bed. After about 30 minutes of me trying to sleep I went to Dave and asked him again if they could keep it down. I finally passed out from exhaustion. I woke up to find beer bottles everywhere, my Coke half way gone, and cigarette butts in a bowl on the coffee table (Patrick and I didn't smoke in the living room because Dave didn't like the smell of cigarettes. I guess smoke doesn't smell so bad when you are trying to please your friends and let them smoke in the living room.)

Patrick and I dealt with all that stuff but the following was the straw that broke the camel's back:

After the toilet cleaning Patrick and I decided to hire a maid. We still had not tackled the bathroom and after the toilet we had no intention of cleaning anymore for fear of what we might find. We talked to Dave about getting a maid and he said that would be fine with him as long as it was only 15 yuan an hour. So we started setting up the process of getting a maid. Apparently maids don't like cleaning foreigners' apartments so it was difficult to get one for us. Finally, one day we were told that a maid would be coming to our apartment. We told Dave and asked him if he would be willing to hang out at home for a few hours so that the place could get cleaned since both Patrick and I worked. He said no problem. We planned on the maid being there for 2 hours.

The night before the maid was to come Patrick and I wrote a "to-do" list for the maid and wrote a letter to Dave explaining that if it ended up being more than 15 yuan per hour we would pay the difference and he wouldn't have to worry about it. We left the note on his bed so we would be sure that he saw it when he finally got home.

After work the next day Patrick and I walked into our apartment hoping to find a clean house. That was not the case. Nothing at all had been done. Patrick immediately called Dave to find out what had happened. Apparently, the maid was an hour late getting to our place and when she finally got there and Dave opened the door there was not one maid but two. They talked about prices and Dave found out that it wasn't going to be 15 yuan per hour. According to Dave, the two ladies wanted 20 per hour and wouldn't stay for anything less than 3 hours. So the price went from 15 yuan per hour for one maid to 20 yuan per hour for two maids. To me that sounded like a deal. Dave didn't agree. He sent them away. We had been trying for weeks to get a maid and in about 10 minutes Dave had gotten rid of them.

That was the last straw. There were a couple of other teachers that would soon be moving so we called the manager and asked if we could move into their apartment. We could no longer live with someone that didn't respect our wishes and was constantly changing his story about everything. We started smoking in the living room and about a week later we moved to our new apartment.