After a long day in the hot Lanzhou sun, there was nothing more tantalizing for many of the guests of the Home Inn on Annan Road than to take a nice cool shower to relax their mind and their body. This shower, however, was deprived of them from July 18-20 after the hotel experienced a loss of running water due to the damaging of a water main pipe just outside the building.

“Ever since April we have had about 20 incidents with the water pipe,” Home Inn front desk attendant Jia Jingjing said. “Every three or four days we have no [running] water.”

The frequent incidents stem from ongoing road construction that requires operating heavy machinery around the area’s primary water pipe.

“They were fixing the road and the big digger hit the pipe and broke it,” Jia said. “This keeps happening and I just think from the customer’s perspectives; you have guests and when they can’t get water to wash it’s just awful.”

Some of those guests included the students and teachers from five of the high schools, including an American high school, attending the IREX-sponsored journalism camp at The High School Attached to Northwest Normal University. Without running water, these participants were forced to cope from Monday afternoon to Wednesday night.

“I had friends who lived near the hotel so I was able to take a shower at their house,” Wang Kan said. Kan is a student from The High School Attached to Lanzhou University.

Others took advantage of the services the hotel provided its guests, which included dialing “9” for water to be delivered to your room. The water was retrieved from a large water box that is stowed behind the front desk of the hotel and brought to you by hotel attendants.

“I didn’t take a shower, but the hotel provided some water so I could do some basic washing like my face and brushing my teeth,” Li Yushan, a student from Baitin No. 1 High School, said.

“I was fine without the water,” Yang Cai Fen, a teacher at the No. 1 High School in Yuzhong Yizhang, said. “On the first day, there was still a little water in the pipe so I gathered that water as much as possible because the water source is really important. There’s been no water several times and the government has enough experience to deal with it. There were people to carry water from the truck with buckets and we could call the hotel and they would have somebody provide us with water.”

Interpreter Gao Hui, a translator for the Americans at the journalism camp, had a similar experience to Yang.

“The first day I actually had water and the second day they already had my sink filled up so I could wash my hands, feet and face,” she said.

Overall, the hotel guests seemed to be satisfied with the way the hotel handled the situation.

“They handled [the situation] all right partly from experience and partly because they’re a business and they want to make their customers happy,” Gao said. “It seemed like people were trained; the front desk people were friendly and answered questions with patience and every time you asked, they offered to give you water.”

“Our goal is to make our customers happy,” Jia said. “We feel the pressure and understand that the days are hot and our guests want water for showers.”

Until the construction ends, however, there can be no guarantees that the Home Inn will have running water on a daily basis.

“We were told that this construction would last until September but my guess is that by September it won’t be finished,” Jia said.