My kitchen is pretty nifty. Especially for a Chinese home.
Here’s an inside shot of the refrigerator. Why? Well, some of you are so curious about everything. Why not?
This is a nice shot of my oven.
But this one is much better, don’t you think?
The oven can hold a 9×13 pan, and it’s tall enough to bake loaves of bread without the bread touching the top of the oven (been there, done that). It’s sort of a glorified toaster oven, but it heats up super quick and cooks efficiently.
Although this may look like a dishwasher, it isn’t. It’s a sanitizer. It simply heats the dishes to kill germs. We don’t use it. I just store dishes inside it.
A kitchen related tidbit — In America, we eat on plates and serve things out of bowls. In China, we eat out of a bowl and serve things on plates.
See that cabinet in the corner? You’ll never guess what it is.
Do you know yet? Probably not.
Push this button. Once for each person you have to feed.
Pull out the drawer at the bottom, and you’ve got premeasured rice! This is a rice bin. You pour your rice in the top. Very handy!
Under the gas burners are drawers for storage. These are great! You can cram so much more in them than a cabinet.
This is another glorious picture. A hot water heater in the kitchen. I’ve lived in some apartments without hot water in the kitchen. (I would carry it in from the bathroom in a bucket.) I’ve had other kitchens with tiny hot water heaters under the sink. You can get one sink full of hot water, and then it’s all gone. But this is a gas hot water heater. That means limitless hot water! As the water passes through, it’s heated up. The heater doesn’t store water. Glorious, I tell you! Truly glorious!
Six years in China and this next feature was a first for me. Strange place for another faucet, over here in the corner.
That’s not just a tray there. It’s hiding a HOLE!
Under the cabinet is a huge pottery vat to hold water. This is for those (not too uncommon) times when the water is turned off. Kind of tells you something about how frequent it is that someone would install this kind of thing.
I know that you’ll want to know why. Honestly, I don’t understand it. I just know that the water in China is frequently turned off There’s usually some general explanation about working on the water pipes. Why it’s so frequent, I really can’t comprehend. All I know is that when you’ve got no water, this big tank is a godsend! As a matter of fact, we’re without water right now! 
Yep, in our first month here, the master bathroom has flooded twice from the floor drain–sewage. Nice. Real nice.
But I guess we’re better off than the downstairs neighbors. They have sewage running down three walls of their home.
Obviously the entire plumbing design of our side of the apartment is flawed and has to be redone. So we’re without water until tomorrow night (altogether about 55 hours). Our across the hall neighbor is kind enough to let us get water to fill up our tanks and buckets.
More Posts Like This One:
