My Shower

After 5 days of trying to figure out this thing, I decided that my shower deserved its own blog post. As you can see, the shower itself is a cramped but ample space. It is relatively clean inside, although I still feel like one of these days I'll need some tough-actin' Tinactin. But the most interesting thing about the shower is the actual faucet apparatus. If you've ever been to South America, you may be familiar with this type of device. In the right of the picture on the bottom, you can see the showerhead. Pretty straightforward. But look carefully and you'll notice a curly cord running up into a tiny little plastic tube that ultimately connects to a black fuse switch. This, folks, is an electric showerhead. Why? Because it's its own water heater. And boy does this thing suck up the power. The bathroom lights dim each time you turn on the water. Pretty easy, right? Just turn on the water and it heats itself! If only it were that easy. The first day, I was trying desperately to fiddle with the knob until finally I got some semblance of warmness in the water, and then as soon as I hopped in the water came on full force, and it became cold as ice. I nearly hyperventilated. So that was my first discovery about the shower. The harder the water comes out, the colder it gets. So in testing this theory further, I turned the knob so that the water was barely a trickle, and it was scalding hot. The water was at such a trickle that the heater couldn't decide whether to be on and off, as evidenced by the stopping and going of the hum that it makes as well as the flickering of the bathroom lights.

So this was my second discovery - that in order to have comfortable water you had to constantly switch between a scalding trickle and an ice cold barrage. Needless to say this makes for a very exciting shower experience, as it's hard to rinse the shampoo out of your hair with a trickle, but the frigid onslaught that you would have to suffer to rinse off quickly almost makes you want to go to work with a sudsy head.

One of these days, maybe I'll unlock the secret to these things. But until then, who needs coffee when you have such a unique way to start your day?