Accommodations
The apartment that I was placed in was above average. I had experience from the Changchun incident 'The Passport Heist of Changchun' that this two bedroom apartment was better than any that the average Chinese family will ever live in. When I had arrived there were two beds, a very dirty aquarium with two live fish residing in the dark green water, stand up shower, western toilet (I mention this because it had became such a rarity to see them after I had left Canada) gas stove top, no oven, tiny fridge and very little cutlery. From there I made it as homely as possible but with nothing but a suitcase full of mostly clothing there wasn't much I could do until I went shopping for some anime posters.I had to obtain kitchen ware from one of the foreign liaisons in the end she donated what she could (a pot, a pan, two bowls and chopsticks) everything else I had to buy. Later on the school provided me with a toaster, a wee toaster oven and a rice cooker.
As for Internet you need a VPN for most restricted websites such as facebook and even blogger. If you don't own a laptop you will be provided one from about a million years ago. I believe the one they supplied me had about 4G of hard drive space. As for water there was a button (a little metal disc) under my kitchen sink that measured how much water I was using in my kitchen and my hot water heater in the bathroom. Power I had to pay for myself and it never really cost all that much about 100RMB (6.8 RMB = 1 CAD). I didn't get A/C in my apartment but since I wasn't facing East my apartment never got very hot so a fan sufficed quite well. Winter was another story. I needed the school to provide me with a very large space heater that took a lot of complaining, I usually ended up hiding in my bedroom under two sets of blankets with the space heater sitting on a table pointing over my bed.
Now a short blurb about heating in China: My floors were heated but heat in China or at least Jilin was regulated by the government. I guess how it works is that everyone pays one fee and you get the same amount of heat as everyone else. So for some reason they decide that October was late enough into the winter before they would turn it on. If you can guess they also turned off the heat early due to all sorts of unknown reasons. They just figured that everyone can manage.
In comparison to other teacher's homes with this company I had the pick of the crop even though I hadn't known it at the time of arrival. They lived in small cramped spaces that we would call bachelors here in Canada but with walls to divide the rooms. The regular bathrooms has a shower head sticking out of the wall and a shower curtain that hung from the ceiling to substitute as a 'en suite shower'. I mention this en suite because later on I start meeting locals through work and friends of friends that not everyone has showers within their humble abode. It is very common that people would go to the public showers every couple of days to wash up. I have never done this myself but I hear that it is fairly cheap and very common in daily life.
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