It’s not uncommon to lose electricity for a day or two in China without any explanation, especially out where we live.

But here’s an interesting power outage story that ends in pecans…

Last month I went to pay the electric bill for our apartment.  (You’ve heard about going "paperless".  Well, China has this concept down already.  They don’t use paper; unfortunately they also don’t use the internet or any other digital format for paying bills–at least not where I live, other parts of China may work differently.  You won’t ever receive a bill in the mail for utilities nor will you receive any notification that a bill is due in paper form.  You just have to know where to pay the bills and more importantly WHEN…)

So I went to pay in March, but was told I didn’t owe anything.  OK. No worries.

So on the 9th of April I went back to pay my electric bill (at the bank) only to be told that I needed to come back on the 10th through the 20th to pay it.  Frustrating, but not uncommon.  I resolved to return.

Of course I quickly forgot and on April 21st at 9 a.m. our electricity was suddenly just GONE.  At first I didn’t make the "lack of payment" connection.  Since power had been out at various times during the week I just assumed that it was a normal outage.  Since it is nearly impossible to tell during the daylight hours who has and/or does not have electricity, we assumed that  our whole complex was cut off.

In the meantime I went and paid our bill which was a whopping $5 (US).  When it got dark outside we noticed that some of the windows in the apartment complex had LIGHT emanating from them.  Electric lighting that is.  Hmmmm.  Christa got curious and began asking our neighbors if they had electricity.  Many of them did (while a few didn’t).   A friendly half-Tibetan neighbor took Christa under her wing and started making further inquiries.  She asked around and finally called the electric company for us…

Turns out, paying your bill on the 21st of the month IS a bit too late and our power was cut off. So, after a candle-lit evening, I had to wake up early the next morning, walk down to the electric company and pay the fee $1.50 (US) to get our electricity turned back on.  It was the first time in my life I had my power turned off because I was negligent in paying my bill.  Oh, the SHAME!  It was quickly fixed thankfully.  That afternoon we had power once more.

Our friendly neighbor also had a nice chat with Christa and gave her some pecans as a parting gift.  When Christa asked where the pecans had come from (since she had never seen them here) our neighbor replied, "America." 

(But she had to import them all the way from Xining.  Turns out you can’t buy imported pecans in J-town.  But, man, they have a stringent 0-tolerance policy when it comes to tardy bill pay!)