Trevor is pointing to the street we live on, just to give you guys a visual of where we are in the city.
Firstly, I apologize to those of you who actually checked the blog looking for a post yesterday. I honestly forgot to write one 😦 But in my defense, the last post is a hard act to follow. Tuesday we had the most views EVER on the blog with 173 views total! You guys rock! Obviously, “Tiny Belgian Apartment Workout Plan” was a big hit. It was definitely the most fun we’ve had writing a post as well.
Evidently, we, and everyone else in our building did enough phone raises to the landlord that the heat was eventually a priority to them, and they came over and “fixed” it again. It’s not as broken now, meaning that the people downstairs have consistently working heat, while the apartments on the top floor (i.e us) have an on-again-off-again relationship with the radiator. Luckily, we didn’t splurge on a space heater, as our landlords realized that forcing some of their tenants to live without heat while others in the building have full access to all it’s glory is unfair. So we got a “free” space heater. Mind you, we’ve already paid for the full year of utilities up front when we signed the lease. (That’s how it works here). So it’s been frustrating, to say the least, to not have those utilities available.
However, there’s barely a day that goes by in this building when something isn’t being “fixed.” By that I mean the two incompetent, and most definitely inexpensive, workmen whom we fondly call “The Mario Brothers” (because of their round tummies and mustaches) are always dropping by unannounced to fix some thing or another. Last week, they forced their way into our place to paint a previously unpainted portion of our upstairs wall and fix an unfinished portion of the ceiling. They could have just finished this before we moved in, but no. They decided it made more sense to wait until 5 weeks after we’d been living here to do this. We had to move and cover our mattress and everything else in our bedroom while they made a mess upstairs, which they, of course, neglected to clean up afterward. There’s also a slightly less brainless, though infinitely more sweaty handy man by the name of Bruno, who comes by to install useless apartment accoutrements and fix the electricity when it randomly craps out over the weekend. He works diligently while sweating profusely, grunting, and making ample use of his single English curse word. All this was done and we still didn’t have any heat yet!! I mean, jeez, get your priorities straight! We could have lived our entire stint here with a partially unpainted wall but not without heat!
Somehow, we really lucked out with the specific room we got. Our next door neighbor’s internet jack doesn’t work at all (he’s currently sharing internet with us via a wireless router plugged into our jack), and the electric wiring in his bathroom is messed up something awful. He has 6 light bulbs over the mirror and only 1 of them works at a time, but the working light bulb is changing constantly. In the meantime, he showers by candlelight…seriously! Each step of our neighbor to the right’s super steep staircase slants slightly downward making it an absolute nightmare to descend. Lastly, our third neighbor on the floor didn’t have hot water for more than a month, (and no heat either) and since she’s on the north side of the building, didn’t get much sunlight to warm up the place. She’s absolutely miserable here, and wants to break the lease and find somewhere else. Luckily, we’ve avoided all these additional problems.
I don’t mean to sound like we hate it here. We love it, honestly! The people in the building are nice, though sometimes loud, and the location is great. We are close to all of Trevor’s classes, walking distance from two grocery stores, and minutes from the Grote Markt (city center), shopping district, etc. But living here isn’t all about eating waffles, drinking beer, and gallivanting around Europe; adjusting can be difficult at times, and that deserves attention on the blog too.
if you find that you are still freezing after your repairman does nothing (again), i will pass on my advice – hot water bottle. it helped me survive and broken radiator through the frigid alps winter.