In my 1st and 2nd years of graduate school, I lived in a cheap and efficient but terrible apartment. I was proud of myself for having found what I thought was the best combination of cheap, efficient, and most well located place on campus. I even took over someone's lease and therefore didn't have to put down a deposit. The apartment cost $425/month. It had one bedroom, a living room, a windowless office (to prepare me for life as a school psychologist), and a small nook kitchen. The utility costs were negligible and it was a short bike ride to the gym, university center, and grocery store. I thought I'd love it.
In the end, I learned the meaning of the saying, You get what you pay for. Or in Argentina, lo que sale barato al fin sale caro. Or what's cheap ends up being expensive. Allow me to run down the issues with the apartment.
1. Train: I was less than 30 yards from train tracks and the train passed multiple times daily and nightly. And every time it did, because it was a college town and drunken college kids were known to wander down the tracks, it would blare its horn relentlessly and invariably wake me up multiple times throughout the night.
2. Former uranium processing plant: I was about 250 yards away from a former uranium processing plant. I didn't believe the rumor at first but confirmed it by going to talk to the city's environmental director who showed me the former map of the area and gave me the history of the 2 botched cleanups. It turns out that in WWII we disguised a uranium processing plant with a dairy farm smack dab in the middle of Oxford. It has been cleaned up twice, but doubts remain as to the quality of the cleanup. On top of it now sits new student housing that some builder finally got the guts to build, as if 50 years were enough for the effects of radioactive material to dissipate.
3. Lack of Airconditioning: There was one window unit in the apartment that did little to cool even the kitchen area which it blew right into. And in the inferno Oxford summers I had a technique of running my fan in the window all night and putting in front of it a large bowl of ice from my freezer. The semi cool air usually lasted about 30 minutes and I tried my hardest to fall asleep in this time.
4. Neighbors: The house next to me seemed to have parties every night. My upstairs neighbor I called my roommate because I could hear her every move. I knew when she got home at 3 in the morning. I could hear her vomit at 8 in the morning when I'd wake up early to finish reports before class. And worst of all, I had to call the police on her when she threw a huge Rocky Horror Picture Show party. I had a test the next day and was trying to sleep and at 4 in the morning, after asking twice for them to quiet down, I brought the cops into the game...And it worked. The party broke up. But when I walked out of my apartment in the morning, I realized that no good deed goes unpunished. I think every partgoer, or at least a a few, had taken turns peeing on my door.
When I finished my stay, I was more than happy to be leaving. Leaving, however, didn't turn out to be as easy as I'd hoped. My upstairs neighbor left a week before I did. She moved like she lived. Sloppily and loudly. Everything was packed up in large black trash bags and thrown down flights of stairs. When it came time for the big couches and chairs, she simply pushed them down the stairs. It sounded as if someone were tumbling boulders through the apartment all day.
When her Uhaul finally pulled out, I breathed at least 10 sighs of relief. Good riddance. But it wasn't that easy. One Saturday night while I was watching a movie in my apartment, I heard a crash come from my bathroom. I walked in to see what had happened and found that my ceiling had caved in. I called building maintenance and they were there in 5 minutes (If it were only so in Argentina!!!). The guy must have come straight from the bar because he was half drunk and when he barged into the empy apartment above me found a flooded apartment. My ex-neighbor had left the water running slightly in her bathtub and because her drain was clogged, the water backed up and flooded the bathroom and the surrounding apartment. It was as if the ghost of my neighbor had stuck around to make sure that I wasn't getting too comfortable.
It's been a long time since I've had an apartment situation that bad. But my current apartment I think I can officially say has been the worst ever. Allow me to go down the list:
1. Dirty: For the first time in my life, I had to do serious cleaning before entering an apartment. In every single apartment I've rented in the US, it's cleaned before I enter. This one, no. There were dirty rags and paint cans scattered all over the place and it was generally filthy. I called the owner to ask him if someone was going to clean it and he said 'yeah, you are'. Welcome to Argentina.
2. Loud: Want to dream of monsters every night? Come to my apartment and try to sleep. If you can sleep through the window rattling busses that pass every 2 minutes, or the lawn mower mo-peds, you may be lucky enough to dream that you're stuck in the bowels of a brontasaurus.
3. Busted: Almost everything has broken once in this apartment. Allow me to go down the list: Water heater, toilet, clogged kitchen sink, exploding lights in the kitchen and bedroom (because light bulbs burned through cables that were placed too close), clogged bathtub, broken pipe under the kitchen sink, leaky pipes in the bathroom sink, bathroom door, doors to my balcony, oven, wooden curtains in both the living room and bedroom, internet 5 times, possible gas leak, elevator, no water 2 times for almost a total of a week. Put more simply, the only thing that hasn't broken is my wall heater. Knock on wood.
The apartment has more or less been a disaster. Or an almost constant test of my patience and problem solving ability. And just as my apartment during graduate school gave me a fun sendoff, this one too has not disappointed, right in time for my last week here.
A few days ago, I went to use my bathroom and noticed that the water was not running constantly in the toilet as it usually does. Bad sign. That means that at least my cold water is not turned on. Someone in the building, as often happens, had turned it off without informing me. Maybe it'll be back on by the end of the day, I thought.
Tomorrow will be day 4 without any water, hot or cold. No one bothered to inform me. And when I complained to the building janitor and the building administrator, I received annoyed responses that it's the weekend and the plumber can't come on the weekend. And today when I asked why the plumber wasn't there fixing the problem, the janitor looked at me like I was the stupidest guy in the world and said, feriado. Or that it's a holiday and that the plumber doesn't work on holidays. Then the janitor, visibly annoyed, said look Patrick, if you want water, you can get it from the side of the building. It was equivalent to when I was 13 years old and a caddy and there was no more water in the water cooler and Kip the caddymaster scowled, 'Drink from the hose'.
And so I've been been taking my empty water bottles up and down the 7 flights of stairs multiple times daily to manually flush my toilet, wash my hands, and boil water to wash dishes. And I still have to go to my friend's apartment or the gym to shower.
The good thing is that the janitor and the building administrator don't seem to be terribly bothered by the fact that the majority of the building is without water. To them, it seems like second nature. No water, no problem. And they have water in their places so no biggy.
And so, after complaining better and more clearly in Spanish than I have ever complained. I mean, I had the building manager reeling and nervous. And still, nothing came of it. My experience here is that you can complain until you're blue in the face and it doesn't change a thing.
I was spoiled in the US where a well worded complaint and perseverance often leads to action. Here they just don't seem to care.
So because there's really nothing I can do now but wait it out and live like a boyscout in my-what's expensive for Buenos Aires-apartment, I'm trying to think about this all more philosophically. How can I make an opportunity out of this situation. Lemonade out of lemons.
I think for me this inconvenience means being much more adaptable than I typically am. Being a 30-year-old bachelor who has lived on his own for many years now means that I have my rituals and have become a bit rigid in my every day routine. As such, I like things to work and go as I expect them to go and when they don't, I'm easily upset. What does this say about my ability to raise children, God only knows....In any case, this apartment is constantly confounding my rituals. I can never fully count on my day going off without some type of hitch. So I'm almost constantly having to deal with the unexpected. Which is good for me.
I've also started to become aware of how much water we use on an every day basis. Did you know that it takes a good 10 Liters of water to manually flush my toilet? By God, we ought to flush less often. And it also takes a good liter and a half to wash your hands, if you are quick. If I do this long enough, I might change my water usage habits semi-permanently.
Going without water has also forced me to get out more often in my final days here. I have hermit like tendencies and having to beg my friends to use their showers and sinks has forced me to do something I should be doing anyway-seeing the people who have made my stay here what it's been. For instance, yesterday my friend Cecilia and I travelled to La Plata, 1 hour away by bus and hung out at the zoo and ate at an awesome parilla. And today I went over to my friend Erica's to take a shower and chat for a while.
So as Buenos Aires gets me back for all the times I've trashed it in this blog, I've been trying to turn it around. I don't know if everything in life happens for a reason. That to me is a cliche. But I do think you can turn everything into some type of opportunity. And as the door hits me on my way out of Buenos Aires, I'm trying to see it instead as a friendly and useful tap on the arse.
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