Oh, China

Yesterday, when I got home from my trip, I found out I had run out of toilet water. No, not perfume, but the stuff in the toilet that you use to flush your, uh, waste.

Let me back up for a moment: there are three kinds of water in my apartment. 1) There is the cold water. This water comes out of my faucets and it is the one utility bill I get each month. 2) There is the hot water. I don't have a water heater in my apartment (some owners have installed them, but my landlord hasn't), so I buy my hot water from the building management company. I buy the water in advance and then insert a credit-card thingy into a meter under the sink to release the water. 3) The reclaimed water that flushes the toilet. Like the hot water, this is pre-purchased and the card is inserted into a meter in the bathroom wall.

So, it seems that I have run out of water. The stuff is cheap, dirt cheap. But when it goes, the only way you can flush the toilet is to fill up a bucket with cold water and dump it in the tank.

This afternoon, I took my card and 20 kuai and went to top up my card. Except, the woman wasn't able to put any money on the card. What the? She passed me a note in English, which was a completely meaningless jumble of words. After much confusion, I called my Handler and gave the phone to the water lady. She was at first nervous (how would she speak?), but she quickly realized I was handing her off to a Chinese speaker.

It turns out that you can't put more water on the card if there is too much water on the meter (more than two tons) or no water on the meter. Yup. If the meter is at zero, you can't buy more water until the maintenance man goes up to the meter and does something magical with the magical maintenance card. THEN you can put more water on the card. The meter is supposed to beep when you get down to two tons, and I don't recall a beeping, but who knows? Enough strange things happen around here that I wouldn't know what was up. And if the toilet was still flushing and the beeping stopped, I'd chalk it up to one more thing I didn't understand.

So, she called the maintenance man to my apartment and I walked back home. Along the way, I passed by an old woman enjoying the sunshine and flapping her arms like a bird. Seriously.

Once the maintenance man showed up, he rather quickly discovered the problem. It wasn't that there was no water on the meter, it was that the connector from the wall to the toilet had broken. Like, snapped in half, broken. Yeah, that would do it. (It seems I'm still above two tons, hence not remembering a beeping from my meter, because there'd been none.)

I did notice some odd things when I got home yesterday: the books on top of my washer were water-logged; the hose for the washing machine was pulled out of the drain; the spare garbage bags in the trash can were soaking wet. I thought maybe Cleaning Lady had accidentally knocked something over when she had been in to clean, but I think not. The water had been spraying around the bathroom, soaking the aforementioned items. She turned off the valve and pulled out the tube to allow the water to drain quicker. I guess. It would have been nice if she'd mentioned the broken pipe to my Handler so he could have told me and we could have dealt with it sooner when I got back, but...

My Handler and I went down to the Alley and bought replacement parts (the nice maintenance man unscrewed everything for me and was very clear about what I needed to purchase and to call him back when it was taken care of). I'm now waiting for maintenance man to come back and replace the parts (we're in between the shift change, so it'll be a new maintenance man unfortunately -- I like the day-time one, he's nice).

I expect to have nothing to report when he leaves except that my toilet is once again flushing normally. But still, that old woman was walking around the fountain, flapping her arms like a bird.