Every time a Chinese person (not Chinese-American) comes to my house, they see the thermostat and stare a minute, then ask if I have air-conditioning (I don’t).
They don’t seem to understand thermostats.
I just went to one of their houses and they complained that they would have to move as the apartment was too cold all the time. I turned up the thermostat and they stared at me. For half a year they had passed the thing every day and never wondered what it did.
Is this common, I wonder.
Do Chinese heaters all have direct control knobs? Or simpler on-and-off switches?
One of our Chinese students went to school early every day to light the woodstove to keep the classroom warm enough to be educated. At lunch they would roast corn and it is his favorite memory and why he is now pleased to work with maize genetics. No thermostat in that classroom, I believe.
We had woodstoves back in Korea! And this was in 1995. It was fun roasting potatoes, although by fifth period we’d run out of wood and start burning our textbooks to keep warm. I’m not even joking.
It’s a good thing you didn’t have computers, the fumes from the burning motherboards might have ruined you.
This isn’t exactly uncommon. I lived in Europe for two years in the mid-1990s in an apartment with no central heating or cooling.
For cooling you were expected to open your windows and doors, and heating the place required a gas heater hooked to a propane bottle that I transported from room to room.
Every day? :eek:
Every day in winter, anyway. Our school year starts in March, so by wintertime we’d be more than half done with the textbooks. We’d rip out the pages we no longer needed for fuel (the textbooks belonged to the students, not the school, before anyone gets on my case for destroying school property). And roast dried squid and boil water for tea. Good times.
What does roast dried squid taste like?
(I’m new here)
Chicken.
Funnily enough, it tastes like roasted dried squid. :dubious:
I dunno how to describe it, actually… it’s just really chewy and tough and kinda salty and fishy.
Are you desribing roasted dried squid or a nasty B-J?!!
I had a nasty PB&J once.
My coworker related to me a few winters ago that he keeps his thermostat around 58degF all winter. I found that shockingly cold. He shrugged and said he just put on a sweater. Where he grew up in China there was no central heating. Some people had a central wood stove, and in really cold weather they’d sleep on a stone slab that had been heated on the stove. (this confuses me a bit still - I chalk it up to a culture/language gap, but would love to hear more about it from anyone here in the know)
A nasty PB&J on a hot stone slab. This thread is going places.
Lived in Taiwan from the mid-seventies until the early eighties.
My apartment (and everyone else’s that I ever talked to) had no central heating. The temperatures weren’t that cold (40’s and 50’sF), but the humidity was very high so it sure felt cold. This coupled with the fact that you seldom got warm made life miserable. The university classrooms where I taught were cold. Riding my bike home I froze and then I came home to a freezing apartment. The buildings were made of concrete blocks without any insulation at all.
The Chinese students that I taught had no idea what central heating and thermostats were.
Papa Tiger lived in Japan (Sasebo, on Kyushu) for six years with no central heating. Air conditioning, yes, but heating was a kerosene heater. The only thing that saved it was the size of the apartment (500 sq feet), and the walls were sliding screens, so you could heat the whole place in one fell swoop.
At least he had a bathroom with a small tub and a shower. Many of his neighbors had nothing but a WC and had to go to the neighborhood bathhouse.
In all the Japanese houses I’ve been to, there is no central heating or cooling, only space heaters and fans. I still can’t wrap my mind around it…
Of course, the majority of modern Chinese houses feature a wall-mounted self-destruct mechanism. It’s a sign of status.
This may be the source of the confusion. Your Chinese guests are no doubt alarmed and offended by your casual tinkering with the device (it is considered extremely ungracious for a host to threaten his guests with self-destruction before supper). They’re probably also curious why your device isn’t painted the traditional bright red and consecrated to Maitreya, the Self-Destructing Buddha.
If you live anywhere near an Asian enclave, you can probably pick some up. It’s salty, fishy and stringy (on preview, just like HazelNutCoffee said). It’s an acquired taste, I think. I like it even though I haven’t had it in probably 30 years. It’s not so great that I’ll go out of my way to score some of it. Here’s a site for it. When I was a kid it was packaged in cool parallel bacon like shoelace strips.
I’m currently in Taiwan visiting the in-laws. They have air conditioning and heating in their apartment but refuse to use them. It’s nice right now and I’m actually getting in trouble for walking around the apartment without a shirt on (my MiL excessively overdresses and forces everyone else to). When I’ve come in the summer before they basically keep moving a fan around from room to room to place right in front of me.