A List Of Three Random Items That Will Make You Stop And Want To Read This Blog Post

I thought about naming this blog post Electricity, Pizza, and Bicycles or Power, Frustration, and Thievery. However, I didn’t think that these were clever enough to actually catch your attention, so I came up with this brilliant title, and I sure you are waiting with bated breath to read about my adventures.  Never fear; I shall not keep you waiting any longer.

Most expats in China have what we like to call a Bad China Day. This is a day when things are frustrating or overwhelming because life is so different from our home cultures, we don’t speak the language well, and there are people EVERYWHERE. Yesterday evening was one of those nights. The day itself was good, but the evening was another story.

It all began on Sunday night when our power went out. To people living outside of China you are probably thinking was there a storm or some other problem. The answer is no. In China, you buy electricity on a card. Then you put this card into box in your apartment building that controls the electricity. When you run out of money, your power goes out. There are other warnings such as blinking lights on the box. Anyways, our power went out, but if you put the card back into your box, you get 10 RMBs worth of electricity. So we had power the rest of the night.

Since it was somewhat late on Sunday night, we didn’t go to get our card refilled that night. My roommate went the next day to get the card refilled. Now for Qingdaoren, you need to know that we don’t have those ATM things that we used to fill our cards. We take our cards to a shop and they fill it. So my roommate took it to be refilled, and I was supposed to go pick it up that night at 7:30. Our 10 RMBs worth of electricity ran out around 4:30ish, but we had dinner plans, so it wasn’t a big deal.

After dinner, I had a pizza box with leftover pizza in it, which I carried with me to the shop (Hence, pizza in the list of proposed titles). Using my limited Chinese and some charades I asked the man for my card.  He looked through the cards that he had and went to the back. Then returned and looked through the cards again.  He told me that I would have to come back tomorrow. He said a whole bunch of other words, but that was the basic idea. It seemed like he didn’t know where my card was, which really worried me. I called my roommate thinking that maybe she had picked it up already or something like that, but I couldn’t get ahold of her. So I walked back to my apartment wondering what to do next.

Soon after I entered the darkened abyss of my apartment, my roommate called me, and told me that she had taken the card to a different shop. (I have only been here a month and a half and I only knew of the one). Very excited that I was not going to have to sleep in an un-air conditioned apartment all night, I merrily skipped to elevator. When I got downstairs, some of my enthusiasm had worn off, and I really did not want to have to walk to the front of the apartment complex again (about a 7-10 min walk), so I decided to ride my bike.

I went over to my bike and unlocked it and was about ready to climb on it when I realized that my bicycle seat had been stolen. Needless to say, I made the long trek to the store on foot.

This particular store is a rather overwhelming store because so many people are crammed into such a small space. So I waited in the “line” for my turn, and people cut in front of me because this setting makes me even more timid about using my terribly impressive Chinese skills (emphasis on the terribly). Finally, I was able to squeak out that I needed my electricity card, and low and behold they had it.  Thus ending adventures.

(Please note that while the events in this blog post are entirely factual some of the emotions may have been exaggerated for effect.)