Brrr!

One of the oddities of life in China is the fact that the government decides whether or not you need heat. On one end of the spectrum is the fact that the powers that be have decreed that southern China does not need any form of heating at all, so houses south of the Yangtze River (which divides the country into north and south) are not heated. That's fine if you're in a place like Guangzhou (quite a bit south of the river) but another thing if you live in Nanjing (on the southern shore of the river).

Luckily, Beijing is to the north of the river, so we get heat, but they decree when the heat is turned on. In general, the heat only comes on on November 15, which is usually a few weeks after you'd like to have it on, and then it goes off on March 15, which often is before you'd like it gone. Luckily this year the weather had warmed up by March 15, so we did not mind that we had no heat, but all of a sudden this past weekend the temperature took a big downturn and we found ourselves shivering in our living room.

Luckily for us, though, our apartment has air conditioners in all the rooms that can also act as heaters; the only problem of course is that they use a lot of electricity, so it gets expensive to use. But we were cold enough to go for it, so I turned the big unit in the living room on on Sunday morning. After a minute or two, though, the thing had shut off, so I had to reset the circuit breaker, but then it went off again. After resetting the circuit breaker a few times I realized there was something serious the matter so I summoned the repair guys over. Turns out that the electrical outlet had melted where the a/c plugs in, and when the guy checked the wires he realized that the wire is not continuous between the fuse box and the outlet, so clearly there is a bad connection in the wall somewhere. This means we'll have to tear up the walls, apparently, which was more of a job than we could do on a Sunday, so we had to grimace and bear the cold without the help of modern appliances.

Today is cold once again, but the weather is supposed to warm up later in the week, so now we have to hope that the a/c is fixed in time for the hot weather to descend once again.