On our first day here we headed to the nearest mobile phone shop to set up our phones. (There seem to be more phone shops in our part of town than any other kind of business. I haven't yet seen anyone actually buying a phone in one of them, but they can't all be fronts for more interesting merchandise.) We set my phone up easily enough, but then discovered that Mark's phone was still locked to 2 Degrees in NZ. After doing some other shopping we figured out how to unlock it so headed back to the shop to set it up, but the shop had closed for the day. Next morning we headed back to the shop at 9 a.m. - not open yet. We tried again at 10 a.m. - still not open. And ditto at 10.30. By then some of the other phone shops nearby were open, so we abandoned our loyalty to the first shop and moved on, but it wasn't to be that easy. One shop didn't sell top-ups for the brand of sim card that we have; the next shop sold them but not for the amount we wanted ... and so on.
The king asked the queen and the queen asked the dairymaid ...
The building our apartment is in has a resident caretaker. He speaks not a single word of English. Mark and I between us have three words in Arabic, and I'm not 100% convinced about one of them. Emily, our landlady, who lives a couple of buildings further up the road, speaks a bit of English, but not a lot. So when we discovered that the fridge was gently heating food rather than cooling it, Mark rang his bilingual contact at the school, who rang Emily, who rang the caretaker, who came up and poked around a bit then rang her back to tell her that we weren't actually idiots and the fridge was indeed not working.
Behind our front door there are two sets of switches (yes, they are very grubby). The guy who showed us around the flat and the caretaker both demonstrated the use of the switches to us. They turned the switches on, then made serious faces and turned them off again. If we came from a culture without any switches at all that might have been helpful, but since neither of them could explain to us what the switches actually do we were a bit mystified. It's clear the people we deal with are convinced we are imbeciles, and I guess they're not far wrong.
It turns out that the single switch on the right is for pumping water up to our tank on the roof. Mains water is intermittent here, so each apartment has a tank of its own, and it's up to us to remember to pump enough water up to it so that we don't run out. We can check how much water we have by going up to the roof and peering into the tank. What we can't do, as far as I can tell, is know when the city is going to turn on the mains water, and the serious looks from the caretaker et al have made me worry about what will happen if we attempt to pump water when there isn't any to be pumped. (Update: it turns out I was wrong about that. The water pump works automatically. The switch is to boost the heat in the solar hot water tank on the roof. At least I think that's the story.)
And the two switches on the left control the diesel-fuelled boiler in the basement and the pump that circulates the hot water from it to our radiators. This joyful discovery means we might finally be able to heat the apartment to a suitably Waikato temperature and not spend our time huddled in front of the fan heater we dashed out and bought the other day. Fingers crossed!
I thought when I first saw this post on my iPad that the photo was of a piece of Jordanian art. On the computer I can see that it is of very well used switches. I guess that is kind of reassuring.
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