another Chinese cultural story

Yesterday afternoon some workers came to install another air con in our guest/soon-to-be baby room. (quick note: buildings in Chengdu don't have any kind of central heat/air or anything...just big cement blocks; so if you want hot or cold, you have to buy air cons to put in each room which help keep it hot in the winter and cool in the summer) Okay, so the workers came to install the air con. There are two different types of air cons, one which hangs on the wall (think Motel 6) and a bigger one (about the size of a skinny fridge) which sits in a corner in a room. They were installing the wall one.
The workers arrived about 4:30 and were working on it for three hours. I thought it would be fun to list some the differences between home improvement workers in china vs. america.
1) The workers don't have a work van, they either come on foot or on their bikes carrying their tools either in a basket, in their hands, or strapped down in some other fashion.
2) They don't bring ladders with them, so they will use whatever in your house looks semi-sturdy to stand on. Chairs, stools, boxes, etc..sometimes stacked on top of each other so they can reach what they are working on. At one point last night, one guy needed to get up high to look at the air con, so they put the front two legs of my dining room chair on top of the bottom half of the air con, the back two legs of the chair were just hanging off the edge. One guy held the back of the chair while the other guy climbed on top to reach what he needed to work on. Think Chinese acrobats stacking chairs. :)
3) At one point, one of the guys was welding metal right in my hallway (that is what the picture above is. You can't see the flame very well in the picture because I had the flash on).

4) Workers will often smoke in your house. Fortunately, they didn't smoke directly in my house last night. Instead they sat in the window and smoked (so that most of the smell would go outside :) (another side note: most men smoke in China)

5) When a worker comes to your house to do something, they will do just what needs to be done and nothing more. For instance, if a pipe needs changed, they will come and rip open your cement wall, fix the pipe, and if your lucky, plaster the hole back up. They don't sandpaper the plaster down, paint, or anything; so now instead of a leaky pipe, you have a nasty looking mess on your wall. (we have this on our living room ceiling from a broken pipe last year) Fortunately, the workers last night didn't have to put any holes in our walls, so everything is pretty much back to normal. (quick funny story: when our friends moved into their apartment last year, there was a leaky pipe. They called the pipe guys to come fix it. When they opened the wall up, they found that the pipe had been "fixed" once before- a towel had been tightly wrapped around the hole. The workers fixed the pipe and then were going to leave without putting the wall back together. I think my friend told them that they needed to fix the wall before they could leave. )

6) This one kind of fits in with number 5. When a worker has finished, they collect their tools and leave...with the mess still in your house. It is not customary for the worker to clean up after themselves. They leave everything for someone else (me, for instance) to clean up. Trash, wall, cement, glass, etc. etc. Another example, if you have someone to come paint your walls, they will paint the walls and then leave with the paint still sitting out, drips on the floors, and so on. Also, they won't cover anything up before they start, so it's important to remember to cover everything and move things that you dont' want to get messy.

7) This is just a funny "lost in translation" story from last night. When the workers were finally done, one of the guys told me that I needed to leave the air con turned on for "shi ba ge xiao shi". "shi ba" mean 18 and "xiao shi" means hours. I was a little surprised that I needed to leave it on for 18 hours. It uses a lot of electricity. One of my Chinese friends was coming over to watch a movie, so I decided to ask her what she thought he had said. She said, "Oh, he said to try it for half an hour". "shi" means both "ten" and "try" in Chinese, depending on the tone. I had heard"shi ba" which means "18", but what he said was "shi ban", "shi" meaning try and "ban" being part of the rest of the sentence "ban ge xiao shi" which means half an hour.

Here are some cute pictures of our "doggy day care"