Delivery!

Getting water is one thing that's tricky in Beijing. You can't drink the water from the faucet. Instead we have a Poland-spring style giant blue jug of water in a dispenser in our kitchen.

I never realized how often I use faucet water, for washing vegetables, cooking, brushing my teeth. Even fruits with skin aren't a great idea because it's hard to get the skins clean. Eating grapes has become a tiring process of squishing them one at a time and then peeling them out of their skin.

One of my biggest successes is when this water is actually delivered correctly to our apartment. The first time I had my assistant, Linda, call in Chinese and she said that it was all set for him to deliver the jug to our apartment. When the guy showed up, however, he insisted on talking/shouting (it's so difficult to tell which in Chinese) until we called Linda and asked her to translate. He talked for 10 min. while we had no idea what was wrong, and when I got the phone back she told me he needed to take the old water jug, and 20 Yuan, or we could keep the useless empty jug, and we had to give him 50 Yuan. I still don't understand why this was a deal, but we gladly gave 20 Yuan and he became our water guy.

The first time I had to call myself I spoke at some Chinese voice, saying, "I'd like water. Water please. Well, I don't think you know what I'm saying, so that's fine." When some water girl showed up at our apartment 10 min. later, Kelly and I literally danced around at her arrival. She must have never seen people so happy. I'm sure that here it's like dancing around the pizza delivery guy, but to us it was a miracle.

Today we had another strange delivery. I'm still weary of opening the door to randoms, but these guys kept shouting something in Chinese and seemed persistent. They had a giant box of grapes in their hands, and what looked like forms. Afraid to accidentally sign up for a grapes of the month subscription, I almost closed the door when they shoved the box at me, smiled, and left. Startled, I thanked them and then brought the giant box into the apartment. Inside were 8 bunches of grapes and a card that read: "Dear Households: The Mid-Autumn Festival approaching, Chang Cheng Property wish you: Happy Mid-Autumn Festival, a happy family and good luck."

Apparently I live under Chang Cheng Property. China's getting better every day.