December 15, 2008 - Apartment Woes

Apartment woes - or is that “Whoas”?!?

We lept a little fast this time – we keep learning lessons from our past visits, but sometimes they are the wrong lessons for the current visit… I guess that is a life-lesson :-P

We’ve been in the apartment for almost a week, and we still haven’t seen our landlady long enough to get a contract, pay the rent (wow! Really strange, since we expected to have to pay and sign before moving in.), get more than one set of keys, get the electric and phone bill (we need the phone bill to get internet started up), etc – certainly different than every time before…

So, our apartment has some drawbacks:

• The sink is leaky, and too small to fit our water filter. On our past stays, we had discovered to our dismay that we can’t really handle too much of the water without filtering it – so we have a nice little filter that fits right on the faucet. And we brought down a year’s supply of replacement filters :-)
• The water heater is a very small tank, not on-demand, and so it doesn’t quite last a shower – we are taking “Navy” showers – get wet, turn off the water, soap up, then rinse – and the rinse ends a bit cool…
• The pila doesn’t get much sun, so clothes on the line take a couple of days to dry, even when there is no rain. (yes, that was a hint – I did do some laundry, by hand…).
• We don’t have internet set up, but there is some hope here. Cable is available, and there is a landline. And the apartment has had internet before.

We called our landlady (Friday), and she said she would send someone to look at the hot water situation. Well, someone came out Monday, checked it out, and said that the water heater worked the way it was supposed to, but it just wasn’t big enough for us. He had some recommendations for replacing it with a bigger one. Hmmm – given our past experiences, we aren’t holding out any hope for anything to change.

What to do? We went through some possibilities – we decided that we couldn’t continue with the cold showers, so we got a newspaper and started looking at more apartment ads. We took our deep breath, and were just about to make some calls, when our landlady says she is sending someone the next morning to change the tank – WOW! Unheard of! We let a glimmer of hope through, and delayed our calls…