Chinese plumbing

Chinese plumbing, like all Chinese construction, is a little jacked. Pipes leading to/from a sink, drain or toilet do not have that "s" curve that you see on a bottle of Drano or something, they just go straight down. If there is no grating over a drain, you can look down in it really far, it's kind of disconcerting. The big problem with this is that the curve we have in our pipes traps smells, so without it, all kinds of crazy, terrible smells come up from the drains.

I was telling some other foreigner friends about this the other day and they hadn't realized it but they were like, "Well that explains why our bathroom smells so bad at 7pm every night..." when all their neighbors come home and destroy their bathrooms. It's pretty gross.

Two days ago I came home to a note posted outside the door to my stairwell of my building. I took a picture and asked a Chinese TA to translate the next day. Apparently, my water was to be shut off today from 8am to 5pm, but it would come back on for a bit during the lunch hour from 11am to 1pm (since Chinese come home for lunch).

I asked a Chinese student why the water would be shut off and she said because we use too much water. I also asked a foreigner that has been here for five years why it would be shut off and she said it was because they are doing construction somewhere, they need to cut a pipe to add a new line and there aren't frequent shut off valves like we have in the US. Both of these sound like likely explanations.

The VP from my school texted us all late last night to tell us the water would be out in the whole city during this time, so I was expecting today to be an exceptionally smelly day city wide with no flushing toilets anywhere, eek. Turned out the toilets still flushed, thank god, but sinks did not work. Not like the Chinese wash their hands anyway.