Landlords and Roaches

Waiting for my landlady to call me back. I hope she's not pissed I'm changing the schedule plans a bit. I really need her help right now. I also know traveling more than an hour in traffic to come here to do this for me is the last thing she wants to do. Being a foreigner living in China can sometimes mean a lot of hassle. Damn, foreign registration regulations!!! Why do they need to know where we live? If I were illegal or doing something I shouldn't, I'd probably find a good way to hide myself anyway, what this is just causing more nuisance to foreigners living in China.

I guess even I feel for my landlady, no wonder she didn't seem too excited on having foreigners living in her house, hmmm… Is this the governments’ way of minimizing foreigners living in Chinese apartments? Whereas before it was illegal and had lots of people breaking the rules anyway, now they're just making it harder to actually do it even if it's legal. So smart, those law passers.

On a less stressful note, our place is slowly being taken over by baby cockroaches. They were there even before we moved in and my roommate and I thought, no problem, we'll just buy“cockroach houses" (you know, the killer house for roaches), so they came three in one pack, and we put one in our room beneath the bookshelf, where it'll go unnoticed by visitors, another one in the living room, underneath her working table, and another one in the kitchen, under the all-purpose table. Well, the thing is, we both agree, that they seem to have increased rather than decreased in population. Or maybe it just seems that way coz we see them more often sprinting about on our tables, could it be that they knew? And that they are trying to stay as far away from the“murder houses”by crawling on table tops instead of the floor? By the way, I call them“murder houses”coz that's what we call them in Chinese (zang lang jia) when translated. Another theory is that, maybe the“thing" supposed to be attracting the roaches to go into the“murder houses,”are so strong that they are also attracting our neighbours’roaches. What do you think? Frankly, we don't really care, all we really want is for them to get lured into the murder houses, die, and decrease population!