China, and the horrors that lurk in the deep

Welcome back! I'll try not to keep you too long, unless you want to stay awhile. In that case, pull up a chair, pour yourself a hot cup of tea (coffee is for non-Chinese people) and enjoy the stories of untold horrors that stem from living abroad.

Since Halloween is this week, I thought it might be nice to tell a scary story. This story is true and unabridged.

Imagine yourself in a foreign country. You wake up one morning as usual to get ready for work. Doing as you do, you step into the shower and turn the water on. So far so good. Somewhere between your second "rinse and repeat" and the fourth verse of "Walking on Sunshine" you feel something brush up against your foot.

"Oh no!" you think, imagining the worst as you frantically scrub shampoo from your eyes. What if it's a snake? or a spider? or a rat?

It's worse.

As you blink away the soapy tears, you look down and see a piece of toilet paper floating past your foot. And it has brought friends.

Your drain has backed up into your shower, the drain that is shared with the sewer system for the building.

In an impressive feat of acrobatic skill, you vault out of the shower and finish cleaning off with abrasive cleaning products that should only be used for sinks, or really tough mold.

You call the landlord to fix it, trying to explain through broken Chinese and English that your shower is vomiting up it's stomach contents.

Several interminable hours later, he shows up with a few of his friends, armed with nothing more than a drain snake, a carton of cigarettes and muddy boots.

After tramping mud through your apartment, in what you can only assume to be some type of traditional Chinese dance to the shower gods, they fix your shower and leave.

Staring in dismay at the fresh layer of soil in your apartment, you go off on an adventure to find a mop.

When you return, the landlord is already inside and has thoughtfully decided to mop your apartment.

You smile and give a kind xie xie nin, and step out of his way so he can finish. He flashes a tobacco stained grin, and plops his mop back into the water bucket.....Oh no!

Oh yes.

The bucket is not in fact a bucket, it's the toilet. Your apartment has just been "cleaned" with toilet water.

Now excuse me while I go bathe in a bucket of lysol.

Happy Halloween!