Gas Day and Mrs Nosey is back

Do you remember reel-to-reel tape recorders?

And did you ever manage to play a tape backwards?

There are days (here in China) when I am convinced that Chinese is really English played backwards. Maybe its just the strange sound of the local Wuxi-nese dialect. Or maybe its because Chinese has so many "ch-" words and English has a lot of words that end in "-ch", and that combined with the tones that sound unnatural to the English ear gives it that weird backwards feeling ...

In any case, just as the blind become good at hearing, smelling and feeling, so those of us who suddenly find ourselves deaf, dumb and illiterate have to develop unusually keen skills of being observant.

I noticed that we needed more shampoo ... so when I was in the shop I picked up a new bottle:

Now to the untrained eye (mine, obviously) it looks like a perfectly normal bottle of shampoo from a familiar brand. But I had forgotten ... shampoo has four characters and then three

whereas conditioner has four characters and then five. Who says I can't read? (Shampoo on the left ...)

The point is, for the last couple of weeks there have been signs and stickers and all sorts of stuff telling us that something was going to happen. We always pay attention to those bright pink stickers and signs, and if we find one with our apartment number on it then we take it and scan it and email it to our contact person in the office. There were no apartment numbers on any of these notices, but they just looked important.

There was a lady who knocked on our door one evening and gave us a very official-looking manilla envelope with a window in it and a whole lot of papers inside - she pointed to the gas stove, something to do with the gas, and we phoned our liaison person and she spoke to her ... then we took the mysterious envelope to the office and the landlady came in and collected it.

We also noticed that there are suddenly impromptu cook-top shops all over our local neighbourhood. On every corner, every spare bit of pavement, and even in our apartment complex, people have laid out a display of stove-tops, and people are crowding around and buying them. There was even a man with an old grotty-looking one on the back of his bike riding around calling something out - either he lost his dog or he was selling the stove ...

On Friday our contact person told us the time had come. On Saturday "they" would come and change our gas over to Natural Gas, and (so as not to miss the man arriving) the landlord would be in our apartment from '6 or 7am' to wait for him. Yeah, right! They just want to have a third go at catching me in the shower!

I couldn't help it, I was up at 5am on Saturday. It had been daylight for an hour already, and the noise had started - doors banging, people shouting, machinery noise, setting up the cook-top shop just next to our building etc. It was about 7 when 'the man' arrived - but no landlord yet. The man read our gas meter, which is in a most extraordinary place.

Its right around behind that little cupboard - the poor little man had to get a kitchen chair, and climb right up on the kitchen bench to get back there and see it - it took several goes before he would believe me that was where to find it.

He read the meter, handed us one of those tiny tissue-thin bits of paper that serve as receipts in China, and stuck a whacking great sticker (with Chinese words on it) across our stove.

The landlord's son arrived - he knows a little English, and when we told him the man had been already that put the wind up him and he raced off to sort things out.

After that the coming and going started - workmen, landlord, landlord's son ... and Mrs Nosey.

Not being madly interested in all the carry-on, I had settled in front of the computer to do some work, and suddenly realised there was someone looking over my shoulder. Just then Peter came into our office too.

"What's Mrs Nosey doing here?" I asked.

"Workmen left the door open, and she just sidled in! She's amazingly good at sidling!" he replied.

I looked at Mrs Nosey from next door. Her mouth was hanging open and her face was all screwed up with the effort of trying to make some sense of what was on the screen.

What on earth was going on in her mind ???

I can't work it out. Is this considered rude in China, or not? People here are ultra-paranoid about being robbed. Most people live in their own little jail cells with barred windows and doors no matter what floor they are on. So - do they think its okay to just wander into someone else's place? Or is it just that we are foreign so it doesn't matter?

I asked a student about it in English Corner. He told me that when he moved into a new apartment someone had just walked in one day ... he seemed pretty indignant about it too.