Not your ordinary furniture

Table is red sandalwood (紫檀) and the model on the left is of one near Datong (大同), which I didn't get to see.




Ming Dynasty style bed also made out of red sandalwood (紫檀). The stuff is really heavy not to mention pretty rare these days; most of its probably in China.






Calligraphy done by China's first president Sun Wen (孫文), known in the West as Sun Yat-sen.


These last three also all made from red sandalwood (紫檀).


(detail of the lower half of the cabinet above).


My friend Xianghuan (向环), who goes by the name Altair.


Visited the apartment of one of the older gentleman I know through the bike club. He collects wood furniture, mostly red sandalwood (紫檀), as you may have noticed, as well as lots of little trinkets. There's some pretty expensive stuff in there.

Linfen Apartment

This is the outside of my apartment building from the back.


My kitchen with awkwardly low counters and high cabinets.


My little fridge and washer.








Check out the sweet lamp.


The spare room, equipped with a mattress and everything. This apartment was intended for a couple.




My little porch with clotheslines and a sweet plant.


My view of the giant Garfield mural.

I'm all settled in Linfen. After lugging my bags through Beijing and crashing three days at my friend Han's place it was nice to finally move into a place of my own. My apartment here is real nice and now I have the internet up and running. I had to do a little hacking to get to a few sites including this one though. Apparently my blog must be to racy for Chinese eyes. So I created a secure shell (SSH) tunnel to the server where my website is hosted and then configured foxy proxy to access blocked sites via that server. Its been working for sites like blogger, but facebook and twitter don't normally load all the way, so I might have to let those go for a while.

Anyways the university I ended up at is pretty nice. The apartments are good, the five other English teachers are all friendly and they say the university always pays on time and is pretty attentive to your needs. I don't have any classes yet but I was a guest teacher for one of my co-workers classes, just so I could get my feat wet.

I haven't taken many pictures yet. I've mostly just been walking around observing and getting comfortable here. Hopefully some images will come soon.