Broken Door

The apartment I share with my friend is on the third floor. I know I have told you before about the lack of elevators in the city. Any building that has less than eight floors is not required by law to have an elevator. That means we spend a lot of time climbing stairs. Living on the third floor really isn't too bad, but this past week the door to our stairwell broke. People coming by to visit can no longer ring the bell downstairs to let us know that they have arrived, and we can no longer unlock the door by simply pushing a button. Instead our friends call us on our cell phone and we have to run down three flights of stairs to open the front door. We walk them back up to our apartment, and after they have visited for a couple of hours we should really follow good Uyghur custom and walk them out all the way to the road, (which of course means going back down three flights of stairs again. Up and down, up and down, it really is quit the work out.