misunderstandings

I'd like to think that I grasp the custom of taarof by now, but I really don't. I moved into a new house two days ago, which a friend of a friend who's out of the country is renting (I thought he owned it until the realtor showed up yesterday saying we owed him a lot of money). His servant/cook Mina is taking care of the house in his absence, and when I called her Sunday afternoon to say I would move in that evening after dinner she said Come for dinner. I thanked her and demurred (figuring it was taarof) but she insisted so I arrive there at about 6pm. As it turned out, there actually wasn't any food at all in the house and she was about to leave to go back to her place, so I had to go back to the guesthouse where I'd been staying and then head out to a restaurant with a couple grad students also in town to do research. We went to Afghan Fried Chicken, which luckily served other food as well, and sitting (because they were female) upstairs in the family salon we were serenaded by a man performing very loud Bollywood love songs on a keyboard. Midway through the meal, a guy in a giant mouse costume did a lap around the family salon (we were the only ones there) and then walked entered the VIP where a group of serious-looking men had sat down a few minutes early. After just seconds the man in the mouse costume beat a hasty retreat from the VIP room and headed back downstairs. Under the costume he had dress shoes and what looked like fancy suit trousers on.

A second misunderstanding with Mina has been water, which keeps getting cut off but which returns every time she's here, meaning that she clearly understands what the issue is and how to turn the water back on. She seems to be under the impression that because I'm foreign and have difficulty with her accent sometimes I'm incapable of understanding anything. Or maybe she wants to avoid burdening me with unnecessary details. At any rate every morning I call her (she shows up just for a few hours in the afternoon) to ask why the water isn't working now and every morning she wants me to fetch the boy across the street (I'm not sure what the usage of pesar means in this context as he looks to be in his late 30s: I suppose it means that he's a servant? Or that he's unmarried? Or it's just an informal way of saying guy?) so she can give him instructions; I was close to yelling at her this morning telling her, No just tell me what to do and I'll do it. As it turned out, the solution I finally coaxed out of her of reseting the circuit breaker to the pump delivering water up to the tank on the roof did nothing. Then a few hours ago the landlord walked up while I was ringing the bell of the house next door--having already sufficiently annoyed the pesar across the street--to ask if they knew what the problem was. He said he'd take care of it and walked away and two minutes later the faucets were gushing. 10 minutes after that water was gushing down out of the tank off my roof because apparently the pump is actually quite efficient. I took my first shower in three days--about 30 seconds boiling hot and then ice cold.

I'm tempted to go running back to organization's guest house for $50/day.