In LA

I remember hearing stories of how in Soviet Russia people had to wait in very long lines to receive common household items such as sugar or flour. I’m happy to report that here in supposedly communist Beijing, to buy sugar requires only a few minutes at the supermarket. But not everything is so easy.

Apparently we were running out of electricity. Lisa deduced this because a red light was blinking on our power meter. In order to buy more units of power, I had to go to the local bank with our electricity card and pay to add some units to it. The bank was all modern and shiny, with a lobby full of seats. There was no visible line, but instead I pressed a button on a touchscreen, was issued a piece of paper with a number, and I went and sat down. An electronic voice would periodically call out a number and direct the person with that number to a numbered bulletproof window behind which sat a teller. There were about 40 people waiting to be called. I sat and waited.

An hour passed. It was very cold in the unheated bank, and I began to shiver despite my wool coat. Another hour passed. The number of open teller windows dropped from 4 to 1, maybe the other tellers had gone to lunch? Lisa brought over some food (and my passport just in case, it looked like many customers had to show theirs to the teller) and we ate while waiting, then she left to let the gas company’s repairman into the apartment — the lack of gas in the apartment was an unrelated issue to the electricity, but one that made cooking and showering nearly impossible. After one customer was at the teller window for 15 minutes, a few women in the waiting area started yelling at the row of tellers. Technically I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but it felt like they were complaining about the long wait and wanted to know why only one teller was operating. Finally, after 2-and-a-half hours of waiting, it was my turn at the window. It took all of 30 seconds for the teller to take my money, swipe my card, and send me on my way.

I got home, slid the card into the electricity meter, and the meter showed 364 units and the red light stopped blinking. Then the red light started blinking again — maybe that isn’t an indication of low power after all? In any case, we now have plenty of prepaid electricity.

The gas is now working as well. The gas company replaced the electronics in our gas meter for the third time, and now it actually lets us use our allotment of gas. When asked why the gas meter broke in the same way for the 2nd time, the repairman explained that “this is not America, many Chinese products are poor quality”. So we now have gas and electricity, and I already paid for water last week. Hooray for utilities.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 4:04 am and is filed under China. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.