I'd like to thank my fellow expats...

Yesterday morning, the workers came...

For the past year (almost...February 18) I have been battling my oven. I turn it on, it gets hot, then hotter, then hotter. It doesn't stop getting hotter! I've burned cookies, had cakes half-burned and half-mushy, and had cheesecakes turn into sad little blobs of muck. It's been frustrating, to say the least.
My wonderful Chinese friends heard about my dilemma and wrote a letter, in Chinese, to the management of our neighborhood. These guys are electrical engineers and they wrote about how the sensor is broken and what to do about it - two pages of details! The worker guy came in - this was maybe last July or so - and looked at the paper and laughed. He turned the oven on. My oven got hot (duh). He turned it off - it got cool. You turn it on, it gets hot, you turn it off, it gets cold...mei wenti (NO PROBLEM) he says! You must understand that the Chinese don't use ovens - they use a rice steamer and a cooktop or single burner. That's it - probably due to lack of space, prohibitive costs, and electrical costs, too. That's fine. But I need my oven to be at 350 when I ask it to be! He didn't understand my needs, and, quite frankly, I don't think he understood what a sensor on an oven is!

A few weeks ago my neighbor was on a vacation with some other women from the neighborhood. One of them was talking about this ridiculous oven she used to have in her house. Yeah, you guessed it: you turn it on, it keeps getting hotter and hotter and hotter! Her oven ended up in my house! I asked her how she got a new one and she told me about a friend with a fine oven who had just moved out - the management just switched them around, no problem. She called me again last week, having remembered that a friend of ours had moved back to the States and her home was still vacant, and - ta -dah! - her oven was FINE.

So, I called my management company and said I wanted that particular oven. My liaison said she would check on it but I was coached by people who have lived here a while to be persisitent and a bit insistent. So I was.

Yesterday, the workers came. They gave me Christine's old oven and took mine away, to be put into the home of some other unsuspecting expat. I turned my new oven on - I had two cakes to bake! - to 350. I checked it with my oven thermometer a half hour later, and it said - YES! - 350. Then I turned it down to 325 to make another cake. A half hour later and it was STILL 325. The whole time! Constant! My beautiful, new oven! Look out, China, here come some even better cakes!

THANKS, NICOLE!