The water was not running in our neighborhood today. I’m not complaining. This small inconvenience made me appreciate how good we have it. We knew in advance that the water would be off between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. We prepared by filling the bathtub with water at 6:30 and we had more than enough to last the day.

We wouldn’t have been able to fill up our bathtub in our last apartment because our last apartment didn’t have one. It didn’t even have a shower stall, just a shower head and a drain in the floor. Our apartments in Jinzhou and Foshan lacked bathtubs, too.

Along with our bathtub, we also have a fully automated washing machine. In the past I wrote about the double-cylinder washing machine in our old apartment. It required almost as much work as hand washing.

We don’t have to deal with that any more. Now we dump the clothes in, push a few buttons, and come back when the clothes are dry. Considering that Artemis spits up on me at least twice a day, this is my favorite machine in the house.

The one modern convenience that is conspicuously absent here is a clothes dryer. I know of only one family in China that has one and they brought it with them from Germany. I have seen clothes hanging on the line in front of mansions facing the beach which makes me guess that the lack of dryers might be official, government policy.

A ban on clothes’ dryers would make sense as a way to save energy. But then, why not discourage car-culture, too, since automobiles consume so much more energy? Rich families can buy Lexus SUV’s but they can’t buy Whirlpool washer-dryers.

In any case, our lack of a dryer was only a problem in the summer, when it was drizzly or humid every single day. With fall, Qingdao has dried out. Our clothes come off the line after a day in the sun, smelling fresh and feeling environmentally virtuous.