As of this past weekend, I have lived in nine different apartments in China. This is disheartening for a variety of reasons, but mostly because the act of moving is so painful. One of these days, we’ll buy a place . . .

This latest move was prompted by my change in work locations. I despise sitting in taxis for longer than a few minutes, and I was dealing with a 20-minute ride each way over the past four weeks. Moreover, the very task of getting a taxi at the Kerry Centre in Beijing makes you want to cry (long queues).

So the good news is that instead of sitting in a cab for 20 minutes, I enjoy a 20-minute walk to work. Not bad, even though I have to wade through the Beijing air pollution on the way.

The move itself was not too painful. We went with a well-known local moving company, which was really good - only two hours late (he said sarcastically). The truck seemed to be flirting with a fan belt disaster by the sound of it, but we actually made it to our new place with no trouble. This was one of those mid-size panel trucks that have double doors in the back. I guess the poor guys in the back riding with all our stuff were too hot, ’cause they insisted on leaving the doors open all the way. I was waiting for the driver to accelerate quickly and dump half of our boxes on the street. Lucky for us, I doubt that pitiful vehicle could accelerate quickly even if it had nuclear fuel.

The settling in process has not been too bad so far, with a few exceptions. My building is 4 or 5 years old, and as with every building in Beijing older than one year, it is of course infested with friendly little creepy things. My cat apparently feels that it is his job to sit patiently in the corner and wait until he sees something crawling along the floor, at which point he meows loudly until we come and kill it (the creepy thing, not the cat). This is perfectly acceptable, even laudable, during the day, but last night at 1:30am, my wife and I were not amused.

Our building is also one of the older mixed-use varieties - commercial and residential. As a result, there is a lot of traffic, including door-to-door salesmen and an endless supply of hookers shoving their business cards under the door. I’m thinking of hosting a party where the hookers and the salesmen could get together, at which point I could politely suggest that they find other places to conduct their respective businesses than in my building. I was a big supporter, by the way, of the government when it changed the zoning laws to prohibit this sort of mixed-use thing.

Finally, of course I have run into Internet connection issues. For the first time in my life, I have an ISP that has issued me such a weird IP address that I cannot configure my wireless router, which does not make me happy, particularly since my whole apartment only has one active outlet.

There seems to be some sort of conspiracy designed to prevent me from blogging on a regular basis . . .

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