Our shower doesn’t have a hot tap. I’m including a photo from the shower so you don’t think I’m exaggarating. See that green dial? That’s for water. Not hot or cold water, not more or less water. Just a choice between Taking a Shower or Not Taking a Shower. If you want to change the temperature, you can go out of the bathroom, across the living room and out on the clothes-drying balcony to adjust how much gas goes into the water heater.
You can also turn on two heat lamps on the ceiling over the shower. (Again — here’s a picture for the unconvinced!) The switches for the heat lamps are located outside the bathroom. The way to activate them is to shout over to your girlfriend that you’re cold. The heat lamps get warm fast, and warm the whole bathroom. It makes me feel like one of Kristine’s reptiles and amphibians in their heated tanks. A turtle in particular, because the bathroom also has that Beijing plumbing smell that my sister called “turtle tank.”
