Ting Dian!

Yesterday we had ting dian which means that we had no power. The direct translation is "stop electricity". Around 8am the power just went off and usually that means it is not going to come back on until 5pm or later. Most of the country is warned of this event because they put it in the newspaper. Since I can't read the paper, all no power days are a complete surprise to me. Because of the warnings most businesses are prepared with a generator to run business as usual. That morning I was on the phone with a friend asking her if she had power since they usually cut the power to the whole block when Kayleigh asked me who I was talking to. I was joking and told her that I was talking to the shu shu's ( a polite name that kids call older men which means uncle) about cutting on the power. I had no idea that she would really take this to heart. Later that morning she wanted to listen to some music so I had to explain to her that since we had no power there was going to be no music. Kayleigh's reply: "Mommy lets go tell the Shu Shus to turn the power back on." The Shu Shus she is referring to are the guards at the entrance to our complex. I told her that it probably wouldn't work since they have no control over this power situation but she was determined to tell them. So we go outside and of course she walks over to the guard gate and asks me what the guards said about the power. I preceeded to tell her that they said it would come back on at 4pm. I took this piece of information lightly because they rarely know the actually time. Their answer seemed to satisfy her at the time. So we headed down to buy juice at a local store which had a generator running. She asked me what it was and I told her that it helped them to have power. Kayleigh's response " Mommy ask them if we can take it home so we can watch a movie". I told her I was pretty convinced they were not going to give up their generator so we could watch a movie. So to Kayleigh's disappointment we headed home to wait until 5:30pm until the power came back on.