The Lights Stay On

One of the most constant annoyances in Alaer was that seemingly several times a week the power or the water would go out for most of the day. Slav even took to hording buckets full of water around his apartment at one point when a neighbor erroneously suggested that we were about to loose water for several days. At first I thought it was just an example of the usual low quality construction that permeates everything in China, I had similar problems from time to time in Changzhou as well, but in retrospect I think it was probably some sort of power or water saving measure. Given how the power never went out at night, and the water was almost never shut off in the morning, I think it was probably a brown out type situation where they just didn't have enough to go around so they shut it down to conserve. In Guangzhou this is, thankfully, not an issue. One of the advantages of living in a giant city is that the lights stay on. I haven't lost power at all, I only lost water for a few hours one night, and even the internet usually stays on, if only moving slowly. There are other nice things I could say about Guangzhou but for the moment I'm just happy to have lights, and AC.