Thought today was going to be easy, but it got a little tougher when our clothes dryer quit blowing. It spins, but no air is circulating. It doesn’t dry too well when that’s the situation, and it’s raining outside, so the humidity is really high. The clothes (two loads), are not going to dry very quickly hanging all over the apartment. Lillie, our ayi, is coming today, and I have a pretty good list of jobs for her that have little to do with cleaning.
When she arrives, I have her translate the dryer manual, looking for a troubleshooting section. It doesn’t exist, but she finds a phone number, and after a few calls, a repair tech is scheduled to come tomorrow. He’s to call her and tell her when he’s coming, and she’ll call me and tell me when to expect him. I hope she can arrange to come over also. There’s nothing quite like appliance repair with a language barrier. I’ve been working on my “I don’t know” shoulder shrug. It’s pretty convincing.
Lillie then calls UHN management about the hot water. They send over a maintenance guy (I recognize him from a few previous visits). He arrives and starts checking the hot water meters in both bathrooms. He tells me we have lots of hot water charged up. In fact, we have so much that the card won’t load. We’ll have to wait until it stops, and then reload it from the card that has 500y on it.
The maintenance guy goes to the outside hallway where there are water lines for all the apartments on the floor. Lillie has told him the hot water isn’t hot enough. He opens up an access hole in one of the lines and tries to clean it out. After banging on the lines, he has me check the temperature on the pipe, and it’s hot. He tells me the water won’t get really hot until the government turns on the gas for heating on November 15. Thank goodness Lillie can translate all this. I’ll have some good answers for Judy when she gets home. My shrug doesn’t work on her very well.
Having solved all our translation issues for the day, Lillie goes to work on the apartment. I begin to finalize travel details for our Korea trip tomorrow. When Judy gets home, we nail down all the suitcase decisions, and she starts making clothes decisions, based on the current weather forecast for Seoul. Right now, the temps are supposed to be middle 80’s for the highs, and middle 60s for the lows. The only chance for rain is supposed to be 10% on Saturday, our return day.
My immediate concern is how to get from Incheon Airport to our hotel at 10:30 pm. We’ll be in a different country. I’m not sure how many language snafus’ we’ll experience. There are taxis (very expensive), and an Express Bus that delivers very close to our hotel (much cheaper). It may have to be a snap decision when we arrive after we assess our energy level against the potential walking involved with the bus.