Shenyang - Post Report Question and Answers
What is your housing like? What are typical housing sizes, locations, and commute times for expatriates?
Housing is focused in 4 hotels that offer serviced apartments that are 3-4 bedrooms. Amenities are pretty good in the hotels, ranging from gyms, pools, breakfast (for a small fee), room service, maid service (for a fee), etc. Most of the buildings are modern and people are happy with the housing. Commutes will be 15-40 minutes driving, depending on which consulate building you work from and which housing you are placed in. Some employees working on the consular section can walk to work from the south-side apartments. - Jun 2024
We mostly live in apartments; they usually have enough bedrooms for everyone plus one room as an office, Euro-sized stoves, and American-sized fridges and washer/dryers. They have "developing country" issues, but are nice enough for living in for two years. - Mar 2019
We lived in a hotel that was converted into an apartment. Charming housing with lots of personality. Downtown location, very convenient to transportation and shopping. - Jul 2016
Apartments downtown or big houses in suburbs. Suburb housing seems to have more issues with utilities than apartments but occassional outages of water are the norm. Commute from the apartments is a 30-40 minute walk OR 15-40 minute drive depending on traffic. Commute from suburbs is 40 min- 1 hour depending on traffic. - Aug 2014
You either live in the city in 2 hotel/ housing places, or out in the suburbs. In the suburbs where I live, it can be very nice with lots of trees and surrounding nature, but many of the houses (mansions really) in the complexes are not occupied. It can be a bit eerie. Thankfully the small area in the complex in which we live is occupied. But ANY time you need groceries or even want to go out for dinner, for the most part, you must go into the city which at a minimum is 25 minutes away, making it about an hour roundtrip. Grocery shopping can take hours, and sometimes you need to shop at several different stores to get everything you want. I guess that is the 30% differential kicking in. But happily even in the year we've been here, we find more and more Western products available. Plus we help each other out by picking up items and carpooling into the city. The commute to work is 30 minutes to an hour depending on weather and traffic. There is a shuttle that most of the Embassy staff take. - Nov 2013
