After my first shower it was time to do the dishes for the first time. During our first day we had used up the plates that were kindly provided by our landlord so I went into the kitchen to inspect the sink.There were two taps: One was labelled “Hot” and the other one “Cold”: I slowly opened the hot tap a bit and waited for a while. I did not want to burn myself seeing as the “Hot” marker seemed to scream: this is really hot and you better not try holding your hands under this tap.
I carefully touched the water a bit and then immediately pulled my hand back. The water was ice cold.
Surely they must have labelled the taps wrong I thought, so I carefully opened the other tap, which also had ice-cold water.
This was bizarre. I let both taps run for a while, but the water did not start to heat up.
Finally it dawned on me that there must be a switch for the hot water. So far I have found a lot of those switches. Every socket seemed to have a switch, the stove had a switch and even the heating in the sitting room had two switches, so I was on the right track now.
What more is there to tell, I found the water boiler in the hot press and switched it on. After a good half hour I actually had screaming hot water and the ice-cold water from the other tab. Interesting, another new experience. We had already learned a lot about our new flat. Not only did it look quite different with fitted carpets, flowery sofas and a lot more stuff and a lot less storage space, but it also worked a whole lot different. We now had to master a whole army of switches that were conveniently hidden in all kinds of places.
I will leave out the incident when I stood in the hot shower and then nothing more happened, absolutely nothing, no water, no nothing. Anyway I called our landlord describing the problem and he came by…guess what…he found a secret switch that could be turned back on and that was it!
