What's brown and has the consistency of liquid? Brown Liquid (Marcus)

We’ve been having this lovely issue of brown..stuff, dripping from the roof of our bathroom. It’s quite obviously a broken pipe or somesuch in the ceiling, and the brown…stuff is obviously rust – well, so we hope anyway. Over the past few days it’s gotten worse. It has also rained for the past few days so we are not sure if it is coincidental or not.

The stuff is just everywhere, leaving pools of disgusting brown crap everywhere. It’s in the shower/bath, all over the shampoo bottles, the little mirror thing – you name it, brown.

So today we thought to get Mr Pan to come over and actually take a look at it. Beneath the apartment – beneath the bathroom, the entire roof is crusty brown and not in a good state; very much like along the wall outside the bathroom. There’s definitely some leaking pipe action going on in there and we’d rather they look at it before we go to sit down on the toilet and instead end up crashing through the floor as it’s rotted out.

So Mr Pan comes over and co-ordinates one of the school’s maintenance men to come over at the same time. He has a quick look, then runs some silicon seal around the edge of our bath(where water has obviously been leaking for some time – previously it was just a black hole.) Satisfied with that, he then goes up to the apartment upstairs and does likewise. Whether this fixes it or not, god knows, but at least we have done our bit. It did crack me up though how absolutely no concern was given to the state of the roof/wall(*see below). In an Australian household, fixing the mess/ruined plaster would be one of the first considerations - here however? Eh! What ruined plaster? Like the time Mr Pan came over and I squashed a mozzie on the wall in front of him - he loved it! Couldn't care less that the flattened corpse now adorned(and continues to..)the wall.

Outside - beneath our bathroom - mmmh mmm.

While Mr Pan was here we showed him our travel itinerary and he offered to help buy us train tickets. We were mostly interested in him showing us how to ask to be in the same carriage..ie we’d rather not be sleeping in different parts of the damned train! The Chinese don’t seem to understand this concept – going by every time we’ve taken the bullet train into Shanghai we’ve been seated apart. We also told him about our mobile phones and the inability to sms most people back home. For some reason I can send and receive all sms to Kerry, but hardly anyone else – lucky me huh Kerry?! J He also said the couch had been ordered, and it was ‘cloth so should be very soft,’ – one can only hope!

And last but not least, the mosquito body-count must been in the hundreds now. I still have no idea where they’re all coming in. We bought what we think is surface spray so I might do the rounds with that on the weekend. Courtney actually saw one fly out of the kitchen sink – but that doesn’t really explain things anyway as we have been diligently blocking all three sinkholes since someone suggested it. The only positive to really come from the mosquitoes is the fact that taking them out with the electrified tennis racquet really never gets old. We plan on buying a second one soon so we have one each as we’re constantly going to get it off whoever has it as there is always always always a target somewhere in the place at night.