The day before I got here, apparently the sink in our apartment had been filling up with sewage (which of course is not ideal) and that day the toilet had been leaking at the base. This is also accompanied by two pipes on the walls leaking, but since we had sewage in our sink we thought that to be a priority.
The next day after returning from some errands, we heard a knock at the door and opened it to find our landlord standing there with a plunger. If there was one thing that we needed that day, it was not a plunger.
We proceeded to take him into our bathroom and my roommate Jake pointed at everything that needed fixing.
"This, this, and this." he said slowly motioning to the items in our bathroom from hell. The old man nodded and proceeded to flush the toilet to see where what the problem was. It came out the bottom as it had and he motioned for a rag he could use to shove down the toilet. I still do not know what he was trying to do at that point, but we gave him an old rag and then we left for the gym.
A little while later, I returned from the gym solo (since Jake had work to do in another part of town) and found myself riding up the elevator with two men who had the type of tools that say BATHROOM. They indeed happened to be some type of plumber men who came inside my apartment to see what the whole problem was. This is where the men proceeded to barrage me with questions in Mandarin. Knowing little to no Mandarin, I sat at the computer while using Google translator to try and form sentences.
"I move yesterday..Zhengzhou." I said to the old man while pointing down. He smiled at me and continued to talk very quickly. "I teach English." I said in very broken Mandarin at which point the old man picked up the ukulele we had lying on the couch and began strumming it. He then handed it to me and said something I could only assume meant, "Play me something, foreigner!" Lucky for me, that day I had been looking at ukulele tabs and I strummed out a few chords and proceeded to sit there while our landlord began singing.
Do I keep playing or do I stop? So I stopped. The old man then looked at me and sang out, "Do re me..." then stared at me until he motioned with his hands. "Do re mi fa so la ti do" I finished the tune and then he demanded I go back down. I seriously began to wonder if our bathroom was actually getting fixed but I had to assume something since there was an obscene amount of noise coming from it.
Soon after my impromptu singing lesson, the worker came out and motioned for me to come inside the bathroom. They showed me that they had put a new pipe off the sink since apparently that was that problem and I also saw that the toilet was no longer connected to the floor. OK, well at least we're getting somewhere. I sat back down on the couch to try and wait and maybe have a little more conversation with our landlord. "I'm American." I tried. That really seemed to get his attention. "Oooh, Obama!" He said with a big smile on his face. "Yes, Obama," was all I could really say. Our landlord then made the motion of basketball with his hands and repeated "Obama" again. This man probably thinks I'm sort of stupid mute, I thought to myself while I smiled and repeated "Obama" with him.
"Hey dummy, come look at this," I assumed the workers said to me when they came back out. I proceeded to head into the bathroom to behold the new modifications to our toilet. From wall to wall, the floor had been covered in, what I first thought to be sewage, was in fact wet concrete. Surrounding our entire toilet, a small hill of concrete had come rising up making it appear as if the toilet had actually come springing out of the ground with it. It was at that point after having nothing to say in Mandarin, that I had nothing to say in English either.
| Basically our toilet |
By this time, the men had found a girl that spoke a modicum of English to come and tell me that I should not sit on the toilet for "2, 4" which I could only assume was 24 hours. The men and the landlord proceeded to gather all their things not before motioning that I should wash all the remaining concrete down the drain. I sat on my couch as they left and gave them a "Xiexie" on their way out, trying to offer up one of the only Mandarin words I know. The worker, without stopping to turn around, raised his hand in the air and only said what I can assume was, "These Americans with their fucking toilets."
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