Heat in China

The heating system in China is sort of an interesting deal. I can't speak about how it is in the countryside. In the city though, most people live in apartment buildings, and individuals are not in charge of their own heating. Most buildings have radiators with hot water pumped through them. Then there are two days set aside each year - one is for turning the heat on, and one is for turning the heat off. It's the same day for everyone in the city. For our city, I think I remember it being November 1st for heat on day, and April 1st for heat off day. I've heard that up north a bit, the days are about 2 weeks earlier/later, and I've also heard that it's 2 weeks different in the opposite way down further south in Beijing. I assume there is the same difference as you move further south in China too. But further down south, there is no heat in the buildings, and it gets pretty cold for a few months, both inside and out. That's how it was for us when we lived way down in Hainan.

So, our heat is supposed to be turned on in a few more days. Recently though, we had some drama concerning our heat pipes. The pipes are set in one of our cupboards in the kitchen, and we learned that some workers were wanting to come and change the pipes. The pipes that were in there were metal, and some workers came in with a torch to cut those pipes out of our place. Then they just left the pipe stubs sitting in the floor and two holes in our ceiling that led up into the apartment above us. They said they'd be back in a few days to replace the pipes. (There were two pipes going from floor to ceiling, and one that fed into our apartment.) Brant stuffed some rags into the ceiling holes so that we wouldn't get any critters visiting us from the apartment above. Then we forgot about the pipes.

A few days later I was home with the girls. Anita was sleeping, and Eden and I were in the dining area. The kitchen was in our view if we turned our heads, which I happened to do at one point only to see that our kitchen was flooding! oyoy! I didn't know what to do, so I threw down a bunch of towels and hurried to see what was flooding. Water was coming up from those cut off pipes in the floor, and I had no way of fixing this problem! I hurried and called Brant, and he hurried and called the apartment people. They didn't really listen to him, but rather were just like "oh yeah yeah, the water guys are there." Fortunately, Brant wasn't in class at the moment, so he rushed home on his bike. I had just started working on mopping up the water mess before it spread further. Brant saw a group of people outside and talked to them for a moment and learned that everyone who lived on the 1st floor was getting flooded. I don't know how we found these two guys, but there were two guys outside down in a manhole, and one of them casually made his way into our apartment to see what was wrong. As soon as he saw the problem, he hurried back out and told his friend down in the hole to turn the water off! From what I can gather, these guys had no idea that our pipes were cut out, and they had been sent to do a water-heater test before the actual heat-turn-on day. We got our water mess cleaned up, and all was well again.

Yesterday was the day that the other workers came to replace the pipes. They replaced metal pipes with pvc pipes. It's sort of the norm to have workers in your apartment for whatever reason, so we've gotten a bit used to this and try to just carry on with our life while they work. Anita was sleeping, Eden was needing a bath so still in her pj's, and I just stuck around to make sure no funny business happened. The first worker who came started a cigarette in our place, and I asked him to please don't smoke in our place, so he took it outside. Then later on, I was in the bathroom with Eden for a bit, and the other worker lit one up while we were in there, and as soon as I came out and realized, I asked him to please not smoke in our place too, but I think he was about done. So, I opened the windows and lit some scented candles for a while. The pvc pipes had to be melted together, and that caused quite a stink for a while too. But now the pipes are in again, and we're ready for the heat! Actually this has been a mild October, so we've barely needed heat so far. It's a bit nippy in here, but that's actually how I prefer it to be. I remember having about 2 weeks of it being really chilly in our place last year before the heat turned on. So, this is a long post, and if there's typo's, then sorry, but I'm not going through to find any now!