Water Filters

Yayyyy!  I have my countertop water filter!  I am washing vegetables and making coffee with abandon.   It was a rough road getting here, though.  Last weekend after Steve's failed attempt at getting an adapter that fit our sink, I thought there must be someone in this city of 22 plus million people who can help me install this damn water filter.  In what may have seemed like an obvious 1st step to most people, I emailed the sales rep for Aquasana filters here in Beijing.  Turns out they experience this problem often in Beijing and will install a new faucet and the the filter for the cost of the faucet which is 350 RMB (60 USD).  The installation was scheduled for the afternoon of the morning I emailed them.

This fantastic news was not without its DCS (what Steve and I have dubbed a "Difficult Chinese Situation", which results because of a misunderstanding of Chinese culture and/or language on our part.).  Charlie, the Aquasana rep, explained that I would need to contact maintenance and have them send someone to my apartment at 2pm with tools to change out the faucet.  As Charlie speaks fluent Mandarin and I do not, I asked that he call the front desk and make the request.  Five minutes later, the maintenance manager shows up at my door without any tools.  I explained with my limited Chinese and lots of enthusiastic miming that he was not to come until 2pm.  He left very frustrated.  The front desk must have then called Charlie because he texted me that they will send someone again at 2pm.

2pm rolls around and there is neither a maintenance person nor an Aquasana filter installer.  I get a phone call from the front desk at 2:01 asking if anyone who speaks Chinese will be in my apartment to talk to maintenance.  I explained that the Aquasana installer will speak Chinese.  The woman says to me laughing, "Of course he speaks Chinese, he is a Chinese man!"  Huh?  ( I experienced my most common feeling of lately which can only be explained as,  "Wait....what are we talking about?") Slowly it dawned on me that she was talking about the building's maintenance man.  Anywhooooo...we established that the maintenance man should wait until someone from Aquasana showed up downstairs.

About 2:15, both the frustrated maintenance man (sans tools) and a very nice teenage boy show up at my door.  The teenage boy is the installer and he speaks both Chinese and English.  After some  discussion, work commenced.  Over the next hour and a half, different people filed in & out of my apartment while I sat in the living room with my dog.  Every 15 minutes or so, the teenage boy came out to tell me "Everything was under control".  Finally, the right guy with the right tools showed up and my filter got installed right before I needed to leave to get Oleg at the bus stop.  The moral of the story is that I need to learn to speak Chinese ASAP to avoid DCS.

My beloved water filter:

This water filter is so awesome, the water that comes out of it is healthier than the bottled water.  I love it!

I decided to have one installed in Oleg's shower as his eczema is going crazy since we have been here and it is due to the mixture of chlorine and ammonia that is dumped into the water here to disinfect it.  Totally worth it.