We live in a very "westernized" Indian apartment, but there are still quite a few little differences between here and the US. I think they are interesting, though they certainly caused a bit of confusion my first day here.
We can't drink the tap water here because of our delicate American tummies. It's not that we're total wusses, but we haven't been introduced to some of the bacteria here. Plus, I've heard that the tap water isn't safe for anyone to drink due to the piping system used to get it to your house. Well, drinking and cooking with bottled water would get expensive pretty quickly, so we have a reverse osmosis ultra-violet water filter mounted to the wall in our kitchen. It has 2 tubes coming out that attach to our faucet. After I dispense some water, it will draw in more water to clean and release the waste water from that process directly into the sink. A picture is below. You can also see our dishes drying on the rack. No dishwasher here.
The water filter only dispenses room temperature water. We also have a water cooler if we want hot or cold water. (You could also fill up a pitcher of water and keep in in the fridge). One of those huge bottles of water costs about 50 cents and lasts a week.
We don't have central a/c, so each room has it's own air conditioner. This is one of the units in our living/dining room. It's mounted high up on the wall, which is useful since hot air rises and cold air descends. We have a little remote control that works the a/c unit. The temperature controls are in Celcius, which took a little converting on the first day we turned on the a/c. It's about 95 degrees Farenheit here during the day, so the a/c runs almost constantly now.
We don't have one big hot water heater for the entire apartment. Each bathroom, plus the kitchen, has it's own hot water heater (called a geyser here) that mounts on the wall near the ceiling. You have to turn it on about 30 minutes before you want hot water. If you leave it on constantly, you will burn out the wiring. That's a lesson we learned the hard way! We had to get a plumber to fix two of our geysers. Total cost for the house call, parts, and labor was about $3.50. Try getting a plumber at home for that!!
We don't have individual closets here. Instead, there are floor to ceiling cabinets in all the rooms. I was told this is because property owners are taxed on the number of rooms and closets count as rooms. There is more than enough closet space. In fact, we don't have dressers in any of our rooms because there is so much cabinet space. The picture below are just the cabinets I use in our bedroom. Steve also has his own on another wall. So, each bedroom has twice the number of cabinets you see below. The kids use about a quarter of their cabinet space; I use the rest for toy storage.
Below is a picture of the light switches in our kitchen. They work all the lights, plus the stove hood and the fan. Our living/dining room has 22 switches and 4 dials to work all the lights and fans. It took a long time to figure out which switch worked which light! That orange mushroom-looking thing is mosquito repellant. It works like a glade oil plug-in. You replace the container underneath when it runs out, which is about every 3 weeks. We have at least one in every room and they make a big difference. I didn't realize how well they were working until they ran out of repellant fluid. We are careful about the mosquitos because they can spread Malaria and Dengue Fever. It's just the beginning of April and I'm told the mosquitos will get worse.
This is an example of a bank of outlets. There are a few different sizes of plugs, so they tend to be in pairs - one large, one small. Every outlet has it's own on/off switch attached to the outlet, itself. I don't know if it conserves energy to keep unused outlets turned off. Energy is at a premium here, so I keep them off just in case. The power will go out a few times a week. We have a back-up generator on the roof, so the lights are only out for a minute or two. We have emergency lanterns that power up by plugging into the wall and come on automatically when the power cuts out.
