Or maybe he was just making his first step towards the 240 mu of grape vines. I didn’t use his bathroom so don’t know if there were chandeliers lurking.

Welcome to my nightmare.

Several apartments ago, when I had just returned to Beijing and was desperate to get out of the youth hostel I’d been staying in, I rented a place in the “CBD总部公寓,” having not realized until about a half-second after I signed the lease that for the duration of my stay there I would be too embarrassed to actually tell people where I lived, and would have to resort to giving them vague, gnomic indicators of the general area. (“OK, come south from Guomao. No, further. No, I’m not in “Rich City” – that’s too far south. OK, now turn left and head west for about a kilometer. It’s the place with the — um –the — oh, hell — it’s the CBD总部公寓.”

The decor of the place was actually pretty inoffensive by Chinese nouveau-riche standards, but there was still lots of marble and pink and blue neon track lighting hidden in the living room ceiling moulding, leading a couple of friends who were on their first visit to China to dub my apartment “the First Pimp Bank of Beijing.” After that, my tenancy in the place became a battle between my liking for that moniker and my dislike of basically everything else about the place. Dislike won, and I’ve been living mostly in low-renovation 回迁房 housing ever since. I’ve had to get good at wiring fuses and improvising repairs to my water heater, but at least I don’t get class rage against my living room.

Anyway, I don’t like chandeliers. They’re hard to clean and don’t like the lighting quality either.

Good thing our dormitory is good enough.

@Jeremiah: Dude, party at your place under the psychedelic baboon’s-ass light. Post a picture!

I wish I had taken photos of the lighting fixtures I’ve seen. Some had shades with images of naked women on them (this right above the bed, of course), some were halogens at the ends of infinitely adjustable tentacle arms, ready to freak the bejeezus out of you in the dark. I remember one that was clearly someone’s interpretive art project, involving pulleys and wires meant to raise or lower the light. As ugly as it was, it might have made a shred of sense were the light not already way too low to begin with. Oh, and the pulley was broken, so you couldn’t adjust the height anyway.

So to Chinese landlords I say this–the simpler, the better. We laowai don’t want 热闹. We want our sanity.