HI SMS

Many food bloggers including the fabulous Kate at pomelosunshine.com have an ongoing series called WIAW (what I eat Wednesday).  Today I am diverging from tales of travel and starting HI SMS…hopefully a one time entry.  HI SMS stands for how I spent my Sunday.
It has been a long day, at 4:30 this morning we were awoken with the sound of dripping water.  This was followed quickly by the crash of the plaster, breaking off from the ceiling.  The rest of the day has been spent trying to track down our landlord (phone turned off), our rental agent (her phone was off as well), our facilities maintenance people (upon seeing our damage we were told that it was not as bad as others despite the fact that we woke them up and they did not have time to visit any other apartments) and finally representatives from my school to see what our tenant rights are here in China.  It seemed like all of these calls went unanswered, though finally around 9:30 in the morning, 5 hours after we were first awoken we began to get through to people.

Our landlord, who does not have the greatest history in the world of being helpful has done a decent job today, though we are still stuck with a ceiling that is dripping and threatening to drop plaster on us at any moment.  The good thing is that buildings are made with mostly concrete in China so we are not too worried about a collapse.The damage is somewhat extensive and we are waiting to hear what our landlord or building managers will cover.  Our couch is covered in plaster, the floor is somewhat waterlogged, Teph had her computer ruined by the water and we had a few other odds and ends that are a bit soggy right now.  We are worried what condition our apartment will be in the future since Beijing is so humid that we are highly sceptical of the ability of all of the water to dry potentially leading to mold, expansion when it freezes and a whole range of other issues.  While the ceiling seems to have stopped dripping, it is far from the end of the this saga.