Sunday, December 03, 2006

Flood!

The building I live in is only seven years old… but by the amount of problems it has you would swear it is a lot older. For instance I woke of this morning to the sound of water dripping form somewhere up above (thankfully in the hallway and not right in my room). I found out that someone’s faucet on the fourth floor had burst and water was everywhere up there. I spent a good two hours helping my friend dry out her room.

This brought back memories of last year. Two weeks after I moved into this building the guy across the hall from me had a leeky squaty potty, sewer water was coming out into the hallway. He was home in the states so we had to clean up for him. It was so smelling and gross and happened repeatedly over three days.

The second flood of last year was in my own room. Our heaters in the rooms are pipes with boiling hot water constantly being pumped though them. Every few days you have to release the extra air in the pipes. Only when I tried to do that the little knob fell off in my hand and within five minutes my whole room was under three inches of water. Even though the room is small it took seven people three hours to get it all dried out(including the uyghur man from down the hall who didn’t want to get his pants dirty so worked in his stripped long underwear).

Exactly six months to the day of my first flood, my room was once again covered in water. This time the room next door’s toilet tank would not shut off. Because of the way the floor is slanted in our building (as I said it seems old), hardly any water went into her room, but I was once again completely flooded. This time the owner of the building was waking me up at three in the morning. After that I gave up buying carpet for my room, it is just to hard to pull out the dripping drenched mess. From then on it has been tiled floors for me.

Floods I guess are a common part of life here. I am now an expert water remover.

No comments: