Mystery Pants

In China no one has a dryer to go with their washing machine. I'm not really sure why dryers are so rare if washing machines have become pretty ubiquitous, but everyone here hangs up their cloths. To facilitate this all the apartments where I live have small balconies with places to hang your cloths built in. Yesterday I was out on my balcony doing my laundry, my washing machine is also out there, when I saw two pairs of pants that weren't mine. I figured they must have fallen from one of the cloths lines higher up. It's never happened to me but sometimes I see cloths on the ground around the building that have clearly fallen off someone's line. The way my balcony is positioned at the corner of my building there is no way these pants could have gotten there except to have fallen from one of the apartments above me. As I live on the eight floor of an eleven floor building that only left three apartments directly above me.

When I went up with the pants to talk to my upstairs neighbors none of them said the pants were theirs. The people above me, who I had been sure the pants belonged to since they had an extra cloths line coming off their balcony just above where I found the pants, repeatedly insisted that theses pants didn't belong to them. The people living two floors above me were also sure the pants weren't theirs. And as far as I could tell no one at all lives in the apartment on the top floor, or at least I think that's what the old people who were hanging out on that floor were trying to tell me. So the pants remained a mystery. One of my neighbors offered to take them downstairs and hang them up somewhere where people walking into the building would see them. So that the owner of the pants could find them. So far the pants remain hanging their near the elevator just as much of a mystery as ever.