Coming from Canada its easy to understand when your shovel breaks as you try to break through ice on the driveway or when your hockeystick breaks after the second slapshot ... But I swear, I have never seen more shit break until I moved here.
First of all you live in these concrete monstrous villas that get build in a couple of months by migrant workers who have no vested intrest in how things turn out once they walk away from a job site. So consequently little things are going wrong... showers plug all the time, doors are poorly hung so you get all kinds of interesting bugs coming for a visit. Lenore particularly enjoys the giant cockroaches, they're as long as your thumb. Friends had a scorpion.
The villas are entirely made entirely of concrete there is virtually no wood in the home at all. If you drop something or tip something over there's a stong likelyhood that itwill never be the same. The floors are very unforgiving to te resident "butter finger" individual in your home.
When a pipe starts to leak in a concrete house, getting to the leak can be a scary proposition. Lucky all our leaks, to date (knock on wood, oops can't) were fixable without having to go through a wall, all plaster, no gyprock.
The electricity is weird and inconsitent here... We get power surges and lose, at the very least, a light bulb each week. I have never changed so many light bulbs in my life! I just leave the step ladder out ... Our little cappucino maker packed it in after only a year's service a couple weeks ago... fried motor... Our new cappucino maker has a foaming hose that keep blowing off into our coffee mugs! That little dohickey on the right hanside (#$@%@)
and there is no where in this country to get that fixed so I'm going to have to gerry-rig something...??
The biggest upside to many of these little headaches is that we have a service company that takes care of most of our problems and the school pays for it! I think in the 2 years we've been here we have had maybe 2 dozen service calls... lots of leaks, A/C maintenance is a big one each room has its own A/C and they all break down. Each sink has its own water heater... really!... they burn out elements...
Our SUV is always getting repaired. Now granted it just turned 100 000 km, but I had less trouble with my windstar that had 150 000km The climate here for most of the year is brutal and sand seems to get in to every nook and cranny. The heat wears your tires down faster, brake pads, hoses and belts. My antenna motor quit two weeks ago ... It couldn't push the antenna up any more and then it wouldn't ever shut off.. It kept running even after I parked the thing...it just kept going... tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, tunk, ...Arg!
I had to take it to a mechanic to disconnect the antenna motor before my battery was completely drained...
But we have a great mechanic!
The furniture in the house is umm crap ... for the most part. But I have to admit that having a 200 pound teenager flopping down on the sofa doesn't help. We've lost a sofa and a chair, with the bottom support blown out of both of them. We have a hutch in the dinning room that looks nice as long as you don't try to open any of the drawers, which can't seem to stay on their tracks.Cabinet doors aren't hung well and are cheap plastic. The two tables and chairs we have all reuquire special wrenches to tighten the legs. Unfortunately none of the allen keys I have don't seem to fit and they don't have the equivalent of a local hardware store here... Home hardware would make a killing here... at least with the expats!
"Every door" comes with a set of keys. We literally have 13 sets of keys... all different for every door in the house... good tip ... label your keys, they all look the same and there's three copies of each! If you lose keys its very hard to find a locksmith ... The things you take for granted!
