Or, to be more precise, Mr. Ren loves his new summer hours. This is what his week looked like:

Sunday – worked for 2 hours to take Jess and kids to the airport
Monday – day off
Tuesday – drove me to work, then home from work
Wednesday – day off
Thursday – drove me to work, then errands, then home from work
Friday - drove me to work, then home from work
Saturday – day off
Sunday - day off
Monday – day off

Pretty sweet, huh?

However, Mr. Ren is extremely handy to have around. On Thursday I asked him to run a few errands for me. I finally got an ETC pass (which is a typical transceiver for your car which allows you to bypass the tollbooths and use a special lane) for our car. To entice people to get an ETC, they offer a discount every time you use it. Despite their marketing, time is the real asset saved here. The discount is 5% so instead of paying 5 rmb each time you pay 4.75 rmb. To put that in perspective, I’m saving 4 cents every time we go through the tollbooth ($0.73 instead of $0.77). However, during rush hour it can save 1 - 3 minutes of waiting in line, each way.

The other errand I asked Mr. Ren to run was more of an experiment than anything else. You may have heard us talk about it before, but the fact that China uses 220V @ 50Hz for residential electrical service makes it not cost effective to use our 110V appliances here in China because of the need to purchase a transformer for them (the transformer takes the 220V and steps it down to 110V). If we don’t use a transformer, then the 110V appliance will overload and basically burn up and stop working as soon as you plug it in.

Here’s a picture of our very cool transformer that runs the coffee pot I brought back from a business trip to California. The transformer is not exactly part of the Martha Stewart Collection but it's tucked away in our 2nd kitchen and it gets the coffee going just fine.

Back to the errand. One of the items I put in our shipment was a set of Bose speakers to put in my office so we can listen to music while Jess and I work. The speakers are great; they are small, look nice and sound wonderful. However, the wall plug only takes up to 120VAC so to enjoy them I need to steal one of our few transformers and use that. What a drag.

Enter Mr. Ren. I was unaware that he was so skilled at shopping. When he dropped me off at work on Thursday I explained about output voltages and current, and that I wanted the same thing except for 220V. I was expecting utter failure when he picked me up after work. Or at the very least that he traded my original power supply for the new one. But actually, he found the perfect replacement.

The whole thing cost me 30rmb (about $4.50) and two minutes of my time. For those of you that know what I'm talking about, that is so un-China. Nothing works here the first time. That is most of the adjustment struggle when you move here; it's that you iterate toward the goal and not achieve it the first time around. Go ahead, ask Jess how many errands she can realistically accomplish in one day in China. It's not many because simple things become complicated here. Not because there is anything wrong or because people have bad intentions towards you; it's just the way it is.

You might be thinking, so what, it's just a wall plug. But to me it wasn't just a wall plug. When Mr. Ren handed me my new wall plug, the receipt (with one year guarantee no less!), and my change, it felt like the entire China universe was slightly off-kilter. Unbelievable.

But for those of you getting slightly worried about the Chinese universe, don't be. I almost ran out of electricity today so things are definitely back to normal. :)