I went with friends to eat yangrou chuan (lamb on a stick) on wednesday night (i think). We went to one of those “dirty” places where the food is cheap and tasty! Each paid 18 RMB, yeah.. :-) consequently, I woke up at 2:30 in the morning, full of sweat, with a massive stomach ache - which was fixed after about 10 minutes on the toilet. Usually, my stomach can take anything, but maybe after months of destroying it with hot and spicy (and questionable) foods, it is finally saying no.

I finally found an apartment that suits me. It is in the complex that I wanted, 5th floor, 2 bedrooms, ~80 square meters, unfurnished, with appliances, RMB 2600/month. I will be moving at the end of the week. Today, I went to 5 different small shops to look for diet coke. China is strange. While finding Diet Coke (Diet Pepsi is more difficult) isn’t too hard, about half the time it is Diet Coke with Lemon.

I, along with 2 friends, saw two more apartments last night. Each with a different agent. The first one was on the 10th floor of a new building. Furniture provided - not bad furniture, not wonderful either. Marble flooring. All in all, not bad. The asking price was 2800 RMB/month. But, the dang elevator isn’t 24 hours. It shuts off at midnight, and starts up at 6am. Now, how often do I arrive home past 12?

I am going to look at two more apartments tonight. I really hope I find something I like. The deadline is approaching. One of my agents tried an interesting tactic to get me to accept an apartment. The apartment cost 2800 RMB/month (338.295 USD). He suggested I take it and he will give me his “commission” of 800. First of all, that is strange, right? An agent, who works off commission, offering to give me his commission?

My homepage is fixed. I broke it by attempting to add some keywords and descriptions so as Google would find it better. In the process, I accidently deleted index.php. I looked at another apartment today - took an extended lunch break. It was O.K., but the agent that I used to show it to me was a bit shady…. :-/ Hopefully I can see more tomorrow and during the weekend. Ugg, this is not as “fun” as I thought it would be… (is “fun” the right word?

Woops. Sorry about breaking my index page. I emailed tech support of my hosting provider about recovering it. This is the response I got (hopefully they aren’t reading!): Lux Scientiae Support (Ronald MacDonald) said: February 18, 2004 09:47:57 Christopher, I'll have to get a level three tech to do that, if he can. Someone will write tomorrow. Regards, Ron Notice the name? Is it real?!