flying back into my cage
I hate the free hotel my work gave me. I mean, it's nice that there is a shower cubicle and that they provide you with separate hand soap and shampoo and body wash. It's nice there is hot water. But the staff are hopeless. They refuse to understand my spoken Chinese, even when i ask very simple questions like what day i'm supposed to check out. It'
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If you imagine a studio apartment that just has one room plus a kitchen/bathroom, then the setup would be like this.
You walk in the front door to a regular room that looks like any in the West - bed, couch, TV, etc. One point to note is that there is probably no window in this room. To get into the second room you have to go through what looks like an exterior door. In every apartment I visited this was a glass sliding door, like what would go out to a patio. Through that door everything is concrete or tiled - the walls, the floor, everything. There are exposed pipes and drains in the floor. This is where the sink, toilet etc is, and it's designed like a commercial kitchen - you can just hose the whole place down. Most have windows (like a sun room) but in the very old/poor buildings this space is exposed to the elements. Then, at regular window height, there is also a cage hanging off the edge of the building where people can hang clothes or set up pot plants and so on.
From the outside of the building it looks very weird - all haphazard pipes and cages. Of course the newer buildings are built more in the Western style with interior plumbing and regular balconies or floor-to-ceiling windows, but this particular style seems to be a quirk of the 70s or 80s in Southern China (lots of buildings in Taiwan are the same).
I will try upload another picture in a sec to reply to sweetmeow (below).
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