Notes on some basics.

(First a quick note that's now way out of date but in case you were wondering, we successfully picked up the package from what is apparently the one post office in our district that receives international packages -- that's a lot better than having just one such post office in all of Beijing, but this district is still pretty big.)

Last time I checked, energy consumption per capita in China was about one sixth that of the U.S. In spite of all the new, highly-visible consumption in cities like Beijing and Shanghai, Chinese people are still used to living without certain comforts that I think westerners take for granted. Although Michelle and I pay for electricity and heat in our little apartment, all of the common spaces in the building are cold, dark, and pretty much undecorated -- I think that until you get used to that as the norm for city apartment buildings, the general indoor atmosphere can make you feel a bit depressed.

I think Chinese urban residents are more much accustomed than we are to the lack of heat in indoor spaces. Many university classroom buildings are unheated, and students just keep their coats on. The office building where I work has a cafeteria in the basement that is unheated, so in the winter the staff just bundle up when it's time for lunch. Same thing with the restaurant down the street where we go as an alternative to the cafeteria.

Gas and electricity in our apartment is on a pre-pay system. Our apartment came with two cards--an electricity card and a gas card. When we first arrived, we took the electricity card to the nearest State Electricity Grid office and handed card and cash to an employee sitting behind a glass screen as in a bank. She credited a certain number of kilowatt hours to our card according to the amount we paid, and we transfered those kwh's by inserting the card into the meter on our hallway. The gas card works in a similar way. We took it to a nearby bank, inserted it into an ATM-like machine along with cash, and our card gets credited for a certain number of cubic meters of gas. Does the pre-pay system make us conserve more energy?

(Btw, we are once again thankful to my friend Peng who helped us find the State Electricity Grid office and the bank for purchasing gas -- without his help it would have surely taken us much longer to figure out where to go.)

Last week we had a knock on the door and a lady calling, "Cha shui biao! - Water meter inspection!" The friendly meter inspector explained that our water meter is checked once very two months, water is currently 3.7 yuan (about 54 cents) per ton. We don't know how much water we used yet because we ended up picking up a bit of the tab for whoever lived here in January before we arrived. In any case, I handed cash to the lady who gave me change out of her purse and then made out a hand-written receipt. The whole system seemed a bit informal and unofficial, but but at least she finished the hand-written receipt with the official red seal of the Beijing Tap Water Co., Ltd. In China, you always need the official seal.