Dreams of moving

'Tis the season of the year to be moving. Most new foreign arrivals - most of us, when we were newbies - tend to arrive in Beijing in late August or early September. And so, that's when 70% or so of rental leases seem to expire. A number of my friends have been looking at new properties recently; a couple of them claim to have found really awesome new pads close to where I live. I am looking forward to their housewarmings - with curiosity, and not a little envy. I am ready for a move too: my place is clean and fairly quiet and has a great location.... but it just doesn't have that oomph factor. It's not somewhere I ever bring people back to, or somewhere I can really enjoy just hanging out on my own.

I'm a bit of a freak, in that my current lease runs until near the end of November; so I'm unlikely to move until then. There'll probably be far fewer places on the market later in the year; but there'll also be much less demand (especially for hutong properties, since the weather will be turning arse-freezing cold by then, and these older traditional houses tend to have big windows and poor heat insulation), so there might be some better deals to be found. Or so I hope.

One of the friends who's about to move showed me his current pad at the weekend. It is gorgeous: a cosy, clean, dry, tastefully modernised pingfang* property ('Western' bathroom, small wooden deck out the back), with beautiful faux Qing furniture (it even has an opium bed). And - by contemporary Beijing standards, at least - it's dirt cheap (so cheap, in fact, that I was seriously tempted to rent it immediately, alongside my existing apartment).

Unfortunately.... it's really just a studio apartment, very, very small: probably only 40 or 50 square metres at best, and with virtually no storage space. I lived for five-and-a-half years in an enormous three-bedroom apartment; almost 150 square metres, and cupboards everywhere. I have scaled down to a place that is only 75 or 80 square metres and has very little storage - and it has been hard: the place is very cluttered; most of my books are still in packing cases. There is no way I could move into my friend's delightful little apartment without abandoning half of my personal possessions (boxes and boxes of teaching notes, 1,000+ DVDs, three or four bookshelves, a sofa and a sofa bed...).

I am really, really tempted to do it anyway, though, because when his winding little hutong emerges on to the main road, 150 yards from his pingfang gate, you see this.....

* In Beijing, at any rate, a pingfang usually designates one of the old hutong houses in the city centre; but unlike a siheyuan, which is a self-contained courtyard property, large or small, pingfang tends to be used of shared yards, where the space has been divided between several households: the individual houses are mostly tiny and ramshackle affairs that have evolved haphazardly over time; but it's a very characterful environment. (And you get very close to your neighbours!)