Living in a box

Weather: purple haze
Caption: Going green. 30% of the surface of all housing developments in Beijing needs to be green. This is our back yard.

We're still deciding where we want to live once our lease runs out at the end of November and I went to look at a court yard house today. In Beijing, for the normal-not-super-rich folks, you either live in an aparment or a court yard house in a huton.

I got all excited about the location - just East of the Forbidden City. I had romantic notions about evening walks in the huton lanes etc, etc. Although it's called a court yard house, it's not really a house. It's a duplex, in rows of 4 or so, with about 8 duplexes sharing a court yard. Now the court yard is not a manicured garden with some grass. It's paved with some plants and everybody's junk. Not pretty people. Think living in a complex with no body corporate to lay down the law...

For 7000RMB you gets 2 bedrooms, which really isn't 2 bedrooms at all. It's 1 bedroom upstairs and then another room downstairs. Of course you could use it as a bedroom, but then you have about 2 square meters to live in. And the windows were... small. So the inside of the house was dark. The kitchen tiny and if you sat on the loo, you could take a shower at the same time. The main reason we were considering a court yard house was the idea that we would have an outside area. Mmm, yes we could go outside, but it would just be us, our braai and our neighbours' underpants...

So, there goes that idea. I'm pretty sure we'll stay in the complex we're living in now - just something with a second bedroom and a balcony.