Oh, the joys!

Of living in China.  I suppose I shouldn't say that.  Any of the inconvenient things that have happened the last two days could have occurred in any country at any time.  I just can't imagine all of them happening so close together anywhere other than China.  I won't complain too much, since it's not like we are roughing here, but it amuses me so I will fill you in.

Yesterday I mentioned that we got together with some new friends and went to the park to play.  Sounded simple, right?  Not quite.  First of all, we went to pick up said friends at the Sheraton Hotel.  It should have been an easy ten minute drive.  I still believe it could have, had it not been for the actions of our driver.  Since you don't know the area I won't get into specifics, but it ended up taking us a half hour.  Eventually we got there and collected our people then had our driver drop us off at a point where I believed cars were no longer able to enter the park.  We were prepared to walk with the kids and did so but it turned out to be a bit further to the play area than I had anticipated.  There was another parking lot much closer.  For that reason, about twenty-five minutes before our scheduled pick up time I decided to walk by myself back to the spot where our driver was supposed to meet us and get him to drive to another parking lot closer to the playground.  When I arrived I received a text from him tell me he would be a half hour late.  Fantastic!  So, I sat and waited for him. As I did that, I watched numerous vehicles drive into the park without so much as a question from the guards (and these cars were not going slow!).  When Ma arrived I asked him if he could please also drive in so we could get even closer to the playground.  The guard said, "No".  I explained to Ma that the kids were tired and didn't want to walk and could he please ask the guard to let us in to get them.  Again, "No".  Fine, we would drive around.    To get to the other end of the park, because several roads around our area are now blocked off, we had to drive south across a bridge to the opposite side of the river then go west to get to a tunnel that took us back to the north side of the river (this sounds a lot easier than it actually was).  From there we could see the part of the park we wanted to be at, but couldn't get to it because of more blockages.  We had to drive west away from the park on the highway until we found a place to make a u-turn.  Then it was a simple exit onto another road going south, one more exit to the west and a twisty turning road to get us to the parking lot.  Another half hour drive that would have taken us five minutes had they let us go through the park or ten minutes had the roads not been blocked off.

When we got home from our movie last night, the kids and I discovered that the elevators in our building were not working.  Thank goodness we only live on the sixth floor!  We began our ascent only to discover that most of the lights in the stairwells weren't working.  Luckily, I had a flashlight in my purse (don't ask me why) and an app on my iPhone that turns it into a flashlight.  We made our way up to our floor and settled in for the night.

Tim ended up working late last night and didn't get home until sometime around midnight.  When he did arrive he woke me up and asked me if I had received an email from our housing agent.  I hadn't.  Turns out she sent one to him late yesterday informing us that our water would be shut off beginning at 5am the following morning and it wouldn't be back on for 36 hours.  Great!  Tim got his shower and filled up the bathtub before going to bed.  At least we would be able to flush our toilets!

This morning when I got up we still had running water so after breakfast I quickly washed up the dishes and five minutes later we lost it.  It is now 10pm and we still don't have it, so I'm guessing they weren't joking about the 36 hour thing.  We went out today to Happy Family (still no working elevators) and when we got there our friend was informed that her daughter wouldn't be allowed to go in.  I asked why and they said she was too tall.  That's funny because we went last week and there was no problem.  I can't imagine she grew that much in a few days.  We now know that the taller kids aren't allowed in on the weekends, but today is Tuesday so it should have been fine.  After some persuading the woman let everyone in but it was really annoying.

After playing we went to IKEA for lunch and my chocolate fix and that was a success.  On the way home I stopped at Metro for my blueberries but there were none in the freezer.  The irritating thing is that there is a good chance they had blueberries somewhere in that store, in the back storage perhaps, but asking is futile. I did once and one lady asked another who asked someone else and that guy went over and looked in the freezer and shook his head, "Mei you" (don't have).  Well, duh!  I had two boxes that I had just taken out of the freezer in my hands but I wanted more.  I had hoped someone would run out back and magically appear with four more boxes.  Alas, that wasn't to be.  Today I left with no blueberries at all.

Back at our building we climbed the stairs to our apartment again and shortly thereafter my Chinese teacher arrived for my lesson.  As the studying began we were experiencing thunderstorms yet again.  Suddenly we heard a loud crash from outside our building.  For a few minutes I was concerned that it had been hit by lightning and when I looked out the window I could see people from the next building out on their balconies looking at ours.  Soon there were several guards around roping off the area and a couple people taking pictures.  I couldn't see anything from our window and for a few sickening moments I was afraid that perhaps someone had fallen out a window or off the roof.  I had to see what was going on so back down the stairs I went, taking my camera just in case it was something interesting (not a body, that wouldn't have been interesting).  When I got there I looked up and discovered that part of our building had broken off and from right around the 18th floor, the top one.  There weren't many pieces on the ground but since it made such a loud noise there had to more somewhere.  I came back up and tried to see out the window again but because of the ledges underneath them I was unable to get a good look.  Whatever it was, it scared the bejeezes out of me! 

So, that's my story of oddities from the past 36 hours.  Let's hope that the end of them!