Mei Wente!

Mei Wente... No Problem! I'm convinced that's what the apartment management company tells me everytime we have something odd happen. With the "chill" landing in Shanghai, I've certainly come to appreciate our heater working. Well, you can image... sure enough our heat wasn't working correctly when it became necessary for to use it. Looking back, silly me for not testing it out prior the cold weather came. Well, it took 4 phone calls and 3 "worker" visits and we finally have heat. The first two trips to the apartment, two different guys came and pushed a few buttons and said, "Mei Wente". OK, it's still blowing cold air! "Mei Wente", wait two hours and it'll be hot. NOPE! So on the 4th phone call, I finally called Amy our leasing agent and explained. That afternoon I had 6 people at the apartment, only one was actually a worker! The others were managers. And I figured since I had them here, I might as well show them what else could use a little fine tuning. Here's a picture of our kitchen with 6 Chinese fixing (actually 1 does all the fixing, and two worked for me, the ayi and driver) the kitchen sink, stove, exhaust fan, and refrigerator.

Next came the great freeze. For several consecutive nights our temperature dropped below freezing. This helped us discover that the people living above us had a water leak because you can see from the picture below we had quite an ice collection. It is a combination of the perfrect storm because our AC/heater unit blows air which caused the ice to build faster. Once again, I called and told the apartment management that they have large icecicles outside on their building and they need to send a workier. The guy showed up an hour later, and once again told me, "Mei Wente!". Gestured to upstairs and left. It was obvious nothing was got fixed because next night we had double the amount of ice build up. At this point I was getting a little worried because if some ice fell off and fell 35 stories it would seriously hurt someone. I placed the 2nd call, this time to Amy. Another person came and apparently fixed the problem since we don't see water dripping.

Speaking of no problem, so I've been really bad a posting photos, Mei Wente. Here you go! Enjoy, would love a couple of comments.

What a beautiful Christmas tree!

We love Christmas and the boys decided to put up the tree my friend John Bagley left for me. We went shopping for lights and ornaments at our local supermarket. Christmas isn't celebrated in China (or it's not supposed to be) but it's clear that commercialism is taking over here too. We found really crappy ornaments and lights. Tomorrow I'll be taking one string of lights in to work to get fixed because the wires are cut.

Silly boys.....

What's up with turtles?