It broke the day I had to turn it off to prepare for my travels this past summer: my refrigerator. It didn’t cool anymore, and so I knew that this was going to be on the list of things to do after I got back: Getting it fixed.

Getting it fixed, however, was quite the adventure.

First, I didn’t know where to start looking for someone who’d be able to fix a refrigerator. There’s no such thing as the Yellow Pages around here, and most local businesses like that wouldn’t have any internet representation.

Then, after I finally managed to find someone who could hook me up with a contact, I needed someone else eloquent enough to communicate in Chinese to help me negotiate things. Which again took a couple of weeks. (You see, things around here often take time and a lot of patience.)

Today, however, I finally managed to have an appointment set up and have someone come and look at my fridge. That’s when they decided they needed to take it to their workshop, because repairs would take more than a little fixing.

And that’s when the chase began. Soon after the repair guy had left, I received a phone call informing me that I needed to go to the school’s main gate to confirm that my fridge had permission to leave the campus. So I hurried over there only to find that my fridge was nowhere to be found, and to find that I had left my cell phone at home, so I couldn’t really make any phone calls to check back. Fortunately, the officer at the gate told me that my fridge was on its way back to the foreign faculty residence, needing a form which confirms that leaving the campus is a legal act etc. etc.

So I rushed back home in search of both, my fridge and my phone, but when I got back to the foreign faculty residence, there was still no trace of any fridge. At least I was able to get my cell phone, and sure enough, my friend called, telling me that the fridge was back at the gate waiting for me. So, once more, I ran over to the gate, and lo, there it was, sitting on a little three wheeler, its driver/repair man waiting for me. I still hadn’t managed to get any official paper for it, but after talking to the friendly officer at the gate, I was able to convince him that this was a privately owned fridge (not school property) and that it was merely leaving the campus for repairs. That’s when he reluctantly decided to let it pass, and that’s when I went home thinking to myself: There’s never such a thing as an easy way when it’s easy to make things really complicated here!