Too Hot to Handle

Ukrainian bathrooms consist of two rooms. One contains the bathtub and sink while the other room has just the toilet. We keep our washing machine in the room with the bathtub. One afternoon as I was in the "laundry room" I heard a funny rumbling, gurgling noise coming from the adjacent room. My husband came down the hall and I asked him if he heard it and what it was. He paused for a moment to listen and decided it was coming from the toilet. He opened the door to see steam coming out of the tank.

Somehow the cold water coming into the toilet was now boiling hot. I mean the bowl looked liked a witch's cauldron bubbling and brewing. Our plastic piping in the tank was in danger of a Chernobyl-like meltdown so my husband shut off the water supply. We ran upstairs to the superintendent's apartment to ask what was going on. Neither she nor her husband was home but their eighteen-year old son was there to field our questions. As soon as we mentioned the word "toilet" he burst into uncontrollable laughter. It turned out that we were not the first ones to bring this problem to his attention. He found it extremely amusing, we did not, we were without our toilet for two days until they resolved the problem.