1) The only time the A/C can be turned on is at night while sleeping.
2) Keep as many lights off as possible.
3) When you leave on break turn off as many breakers as you can.
4) Take quick showers (only one per day) and wash dishes as fast as possible.
Over Christmas break the breaker to our fridge blew and all of the meat in our freezer went bad and ruined our fridge and stunk up our entire house. Needless to say it was a horrifying experience. But our landlord was very helpful and bought us a new fridge the very next week. We've been pretty lucky thus far and hadn't had any incidents related to living on an island, so we thought, "ok it was our turn, this is our big incident."
Actually, that's when the troubles started. Our A/C unit stopped working not long after. After informing our landlord a maintance man came to fix it the next day without us here. Later that afternoon I came home from work and Brandon came home from school to find a note stating that they had been there and that the A/C was fixed now. I was pretty upset to find out that they had not informed us that they were coming and even more upset when I discovered that my I pod was missing. Of course no one would admit to anything so it became a lost cause. Strike #2.
The latest incident is the water. It seems as if the water going in and out all over the island is a never ending thing that we have come to expect. Knowing that we had been gone most of the month of December we looked forward to having a small utilities bill. Of course we prepared for this by turning off some of our breakers before we left. But the only thing you can look forward to on the island is the unexpected. Come the end of January when we recieved our utilities bill and was extremely surprised.
Electric was $167, which was a nice surprise and fairly low to what we are used to.
Water was $273!!!! Which is outragous considering we live in a studio apartment with no washer, dishwasher and a sink that is 12 inches by 12 inches!!We tried to dispute it with our landlord but he was adament that we had to have used all of the 70 cubic meters of water in 10 days. With nothing left to do we just paid the bill and moved on.
But the water issue was not over, around noon two days ago the water went out again. I just thought it was an ordinary outage that occurs from time to time so I didnt think much about it. We went about our daily activites and when it came time for dinner and showers the water was still out. I became curious because the water is rarely out more than a few hours, so I began skyping friends to see how long their's had been out as well. I was surprised to find out that no one else's water was out, including our next door neighbors. Brandon encouraged me to investigate the situation (he was at school studying so he couldn't) so I took a flash light and walked outside to our water meter and found that the nozel to our water pipe was turned off. I started racking my brain of why it would be turned off and attempted to call our landlord which of course didn't answer. Well I decided to go ahead and turn on the nozel and do the things in the house I needed to do and then I would turn it off afterward. About midnight our landlord finally returned our phone call just to inform us that workers had turned off our water to do some work on the pipes and must have just forgotten to turn it back on.
So it was safe to leave on.
Sometimes it's hard not to feel like we are being taken a little advantage of when you can't really control what goes on in your own home. We have been blessed with such a great apartment at such a great price so I always feel guility complaining about little things like water and A/C that can be fixed pretty easily. It's hard to remember that these are luxuries and that most people around the world don't have such advantages. Sometimes I just wonder if the utilities company just picks a number amount to charge us each month but I need to keep in mind that we are so blessed to have clean water and cold air.
The end of our time on the island is coming quicker and quicker and although I look forward to not having to deal with situations like these, I still feel sad to leave such a wonderful place. We have been so blessed to be able to be part of such a beautiful island and have truly enjoyed our time here regardless of the little bumps in the road.
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