A chilling tale
Ah, how can I describe yesterday? After months of predictable routine, we had an adventure! You know what an adventure is, don't you? It's a really bad day that you manage to survive. And since it's the next day and I'm still here, it must have been an adventure.The day didn't start out as adventurous, just annoying. We've been living under two burdens this past weekend. The first is that, due to our upcoming trip to Dali and Jinghong, we need to squeeze in an extra week of school into our weekends. The second is that we have no hot water. The situation here on campus is kind of interesting. Our hot water, so I'm told, is piped directly from a hot spring. For some reason, however, it doesn't seem to arrive here until the evening. I mean, the water gets here all right, but if it's been sitting in the pipe for a while, it cools down. So the water doesn't get truly hot until evening, when a lot of people on campus start taking showers and stuff. (Someday I'd like to meet the folks who habitually use the water first--I'd like to express my gratitude.) Well, the winter break is here and for the last few weeks people have been leaving campus. So, our hot water has been arriving later and later. Finally this past week we reached the point where we started the water running at 10:00 pm and let it run for two hours before giving up and going to bed. It never got that bad last year, but that was last year and who knows what might have changed since then?
Anyway, yesterday afternoon we called the ever helpful Thad and told him our woes. We hated to bother him, of course, especially since we've heard that he's rather busy these days. But since it's part of his job to deal with whiny foreigners, we called him anyway. He confirmed our worst fears--it was nothing that a plumber could come and fix. It was simply a matter of not enough people using the hot water. I suppose we could have tried to use as much water as the hundreds of students who are here during the term, but Thad had a better idea. An American family who is here this year to study Chinese had purchased and installed their own water heaters, so Thad told me to ask them where they got their heater, go and buy one for our flat and he would reimburse us the cost. I was in the middle of the lessons for "Tuesday", but this was important enough that I could juggle the schedule a bit and make an appliance run.
My first step was to consult with the "Jodies". Jody wasn't home, but his two sons were. They showed me their heater and sort of explained where they got it. (Remind me to muse sometime on the subject of giving directions out here.) The heater was a little wall unit, powered by a propane tank. It was obvious that once I bought a heater (assuming I'd find one) I would be making more phone calls. I had this vision of campus handymen tromping in and out of my flat for the next couple of days, trying to get everything installed and operational. Ah, well, what can you do? The boys offered to go with me to the store when they had some free time, but I wanted to get the ball rolling sooner, so I figured I'd risk it on my own. I thanked the boys and ran home to get some money and my phrase book.
More tomorrow...
posted by John @ 6:55 PM
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