Where in Beijing?

Everything is arranged and paid for... expect where I'm going to live. The university was offering dorms to us international students, however, it was going to cost $410 USD/month per person to live there. Lacey and I have a hard time swallowing $820 USD a month as an acceptable rent price. I've been looking for apartments around the area that are suitable, and turns out that a reasonable place can be found for 2000 RMB (=$310 USD).

Since Beijing is a city of about 19 million people, saying that you will live in Beijing is vague at best, and if you were to tell that to a property broker, expect a quizzical look and barrage of questions.

Beijing is divided into 14 districts ( 区 qū) and 2 counties. We will be located in the district of Haidian ( 海淀 Hǎidiàn) which on this picture is the blue sector to the top-left of the central red sector. Haidian is the educational district of the city. I believe that Beijing has somewhere around 67 formal universities. Well, being equipped with the knowledge that I was going to need to look for an apartment in Haidian, I felt confident in the results of my search.

Turns out, Haidian is still ginormous. By itself, it has around 2.1 million people, and that was according to the 2000 census. It can be further broken down into 29 smaller districts, each of which may be colloquially referred to as a 'town' (no doubt an understatement). In my housing search I was then faced with finding which of those sectors was close to CNU, so that we could try and find an apartment close to campus. Turns out there are about five.

紫竹桥 Zǐzhúqiáo

航天桥 Hángtiānqiáo (Space Bridge)

车道沟 Chēdàogōu
万寿寺 Wànshòusì (Manjuji)
车公庄 Chēgōngzhuāng

The reason for knowing these is because when searching for a place to live, most housing boards are naturally going to whittle the search down to specific areas. A site that I've been using to search for housing is http://beijing.haozu.com/. I like it because the filters are clear and accurate, and practically every post I've seen is provided with pictures of the apartment and maps of the local area. If you are not very savvy on Mandarin, don't worry, it translates quite nicely through translate.google.com.

If you want to see where that campus of CNU is at, and thus the general vicinity where we will be living, click on the location link in the footer of this post. I tacked it to the right spot.