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(leaking water)
This morning is my one day to sleep in every other week. Every other Sunday I am starting to go to Chinese fellowship but this is my week to stay home and rest. I was enjoying a nice morning of sleeping in, checking email and starting to study. Then my downstairs neighbor calls to tell me there is water leaking from my floor (I live on the 7th floor-top). I go outside to see the pipes for our radiators are leaking down the stairs (all the way to the first floor). I knocked on my neighbor's door (he is an American as well with amazing Chinese language skills). We both go down looking for a number for a building manager. There is none. Finally we run into some people who live on the 3rd floor. They look through notebooks they have with bunches of numbers and we start calling them-all say that they either aren't responsible for it, don't know what we are talking about, or one even was a pizza restaurant. We both called our landlords who said they would make some calls. The people on the 3rd floor were pretty helpful but you could tell they thought, as probably the whole stairwell of people thought, that it was our responsibility to get it fixed because we lived on the top floor. Finally we found a number for someone who could fix it but they don't get back from lunch until 1.30 so we waited for that. Eventually around 2 a man came, borrowed my step ladder, changed out a little part and said ok and it was all fixed. That easy to fix yet so hard to find the right person whose responsibility it is to fix it. This is life in China. Thank goodness for helpful 3rd floor neighbors and my American neighbor who could describe the situation better than I could.
the pipe after it was fixed (yes these are our radiator pipes in our stairwell)
the problem: the silver thing on top had to be replaced
the result: water leaking all the way to 1st floor
This morning is my one day to sleep in every other week. Every other Sunday I am starting to go to Chinese fellowship but this is my week to stay home and rest. I was enjoying a nice morning of sleeping in, checking email and starting to study. Then my downstairs neighbor calls to tell me there is water leaking from my floor (I live on the 7th floor-top). I go outside to see the pipes for our radiators are leaking down the stairs (all the way to the first floor). I knocked on my neighbor's door (he is an American as well with amazing Chinese language skills). We both go down looking for a number for a building manager. There is none. Finally we run into some people who live on the 3rd floor. They look through notebooks they have with bunches of numbers and we start calling them-all say that they either aren't responsible for it, don't know what we are talking about, or one even was a pizza restaurant. We both called our landlords who said they would make some calls. The people on the 3rd floor were pretty helpful but you could tell they thought, as probably the whole stairwell of people thought, that it was our responsibility to get it fixed because we lived on the top floor. Finally we found a number for someone who could fix it but they don't get back from lunch until 1.30 so we waited for that. Eventually around 2 a man came, borrowed my step ladder, changed out a little part and said ok and it was all fixed. That easy to fix yet so hard to find the right person whose responsibility it is to fix it. This is life in China. Thank goodness for helpful 3rd floor neighbors and my American neighbor who could describe the situation better than I could.
the pipe after it was fixed (yes these are our radiator pipes in our stairwell)
the problem: the silver thing on top had to be replaced
the result: water leaking all the way to 1st floor
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