The Good and the Bad, Part 2

Refrigerators. First, the bad. The refrigerators here are small. The Chinese aren't real big on refrigeration. Instead of keeping groceries on hand, they prefer to shop daily, picking up just enough for that day's meals. They think that anything more than a day or two old should be thrown out. Our ayi (housekeeper) is always freezing stuff before we can use it. If I buy some chicken Thursday aiming to grill it Saturday, I'll find it in the freezer Friday.

Really the only good thing about the refrigerators is that we have two of them. And the doors have hinges on both sides and will open from the left or the right. OK, maybe it's not a good thing but it's kind of cool.

Oh yeah, one more bad thing. As you recall from an earlier post, we can't drink the tap water here so the refrigerators don't have a conventional icemaker like we're accustomed to in the States. Since they can't be connected to the water line, ours here have a container that we fill with bottled water (you can see it in the lower left of the bottom picture). Water is sucked out of this reservoir into the icemaker in the freezer. It's not very fast and you have to continually remember to refill it but it works.