Living in Taipei there’s always something new coming up every day – and it’s usually a situation that forces us to use our (limited) Chinese! Like this morning, when suddenly our water taps went dry. Uh oh. Our water stopped working? Now what?

Well first, I remembered the landlord briefly mentioning that our water pump used a battery. Why? I have no idea. The only electricity it has is that battery, so I figured it needed replacing.

Off to 7-11 (given that a typhoon is on its way this weekend I didn’t want to go much further). Do you sell batteries? (你們賣出電池嗎？Nǐmen mài chū diànchí ma?) I have no idea how to ask for “D-Cell” batteries specifically so I brought the old one with me.

Nope. That didn't do it.

But that didn’t work. So I ventured out and considered trying to ask a neighbour if they had any water (I guess it would be: 你的公寓有水嗎？Nǐ de gōngyù yǒu shuǐ ma?) when I noticed a new piece of paper taped to the inside of our elevator:

Ah, of course! Written right here, plain as day.

Uhh. Yeah. Well, it mentions today’s date (and yesterday’s) and it has the character for water (“水”) so I figured this was it. To my surprise, I was actually able to read the relevant bit: “9月18日（星期六）停水一天” (“September 18th (Saturday) water [will be] stopped for one day”).

The always humourous Google Translate version is:

Dear Neighborhood Hello, everybody!

More recently said, the elevator can not be used by the Friends of the lift in conjunction with worship and dealing with leaking water and other professional staff after survey has identified the reasons for the roof caused water seepage into the elevator machine pit.

It will be 99 September 17 to September 18, (Week 56 construction), and are scheduled from September 18 (Saturday) without water one day, please neighbor early water use.

Be between these, please forgive me!

Yeah. I wish I had noticed this sign yesterday! Looks like I’m going back to 7-11 for some more jugs of water!

I’m home, Jason is at work.  Max is sleeping and some bizarre bird noise goes off.  Takes me a good 3 or 4 minutes of searching the flat, all windows etc., until i realise that canary noise is actually our door bell.

open door: yes?

There stands a very old Chinese man in a t-shirt and shorts, wearing a scooter helmet.  The man gives me a big smile – he has maybe 4 teeth.  He starts speaking in Chinese.  I give a little laugh and say sorry I don’t speak Chinese which makes him just say more, faster.  Then he starts to sign out of a few things about something being downstairs.  I did hear the word chi fan (to eat), so given that our building has mixed zoning for office and residential maybe this is the Taiwanese equivalent of the British Sandwich Van?? Or maybe I missed a delivery? either way, its time to find that Chinese tutor asap.