(no subject)
I bet you're all wondering what our little Italian apartment looks like. Well wonder no longer! First of all, our apartment is much bigger than we had anticipated. That, however, is not saying much. It is quite small, but perfectly suited to us.
Our apartment, like all Italian apartments, is accessed off the main street by a giant door. It is big and green, with a tricky little lock that only my magic fingers can open (actually Kelsie is finally getting the trick). Once you open this big door you are faced with a long dark hallway. At night time you can see a light off yonder in the distance, like a lighthouse beckoning the ship home. Stroll down this corridor and you face a wrought iron gate (not rod, like is commonly misunderstood by people like me, whose big brother corrects me only to learn ah ha, he isn't smarter than me, our dad had to correct him too!) that opens up into a small, quaint courtyard. It's entirely brick/terra cota/some sort of natural looking material on the ground, and slops in the centre to drain the water that gathers after it rains because this courtyard is under the tuscan sun (I knew I could work it into a sentence very casually). Our door is on the left (don't go in the right hand door or you'll be in Susanna's apartment, our Icelandic neighbour ya!) and the left and opens into another door, that leads into a hallway/mudroom type place, and after that there is yet another door (feel like you're in Fort Knox yet?). That door is the door to our kitchen. It is pretty cute, and has all the necessities. Like a gas stove, teeny tiny university-residence sized fridge, cupboard with rusted pots and pans, Ikea plates and bowls, a wooden slab for a table, plastic chairs......all in all pretty spiffy for what we were expecting.
Take two steps up and welcome to our bedroom! By day a cozy couch, by night a bed! Wonder of wonders, talk about a functional apartment eh? A few feet away from the coubed you'll see the single bed, which we use as a couch to watch Italian television (which is really just English television dubbed). Sometimes we'll watch Much Music, which in Italy plays only 5 songs repeated throughout the day. Sometimes they have a dating show on, and I think the point of the show is for really unattractive people to tell the rest of the world why they should date them, and then those people pick a song to play. Anyway, back to the apartment. Beside our television and bed there is a make shift closet, covered by curtains. Our washroom is next to this, and I am pretty impressed with it. Aside from the mold on the ceiling it is in pretty good shape. We have a little washing machine, a sink, a toilet, and even a bedet! You're supposed to use it to wash your butt, but not being European and not accustomed to this we simply cleaned it, and use it to wash our feet at night or I use it to shave my legs. We have a shower that you have to get at by stepping down half a foot. It takes f o r e v e r to heat up and usually ends up burning us and freezing three times in a four minute shower. VERY impressive heating systems here.
If you'll allow your mind to wander back to our coubed.....directly behind it there are a set of french-italian doors (because they're not big enough to be french, but open like that). These open into our cute little backyard. It is actually really pretty, or could be, if we weeded it and planted something nice. It is surrounded by fairly tall brick walls, and there is some sort of ivy growing wild all over it, but it looks really beautiful. We have a couple friends that live out there - Giovanni the lizard, Roberto the black cat, and then another orange cat who looks like our old cat Rusty (by our I mean Trudy, Melissa and me) only a lot fatter, if physically possible. The cats perch way up high on the top of the ledge of the wall, and we've tried (okay, just me) to coax them into our yard but so far it hasn't worked.
We actually have three pets of our own anyway. We bought a basil (basilico in Italian) plant named Tony, a thyme (timo) plant named Tasso, and a geranium named Isabella (who doesn't get much sun so she sleeps all the time). We put them out in the courtyard during the day and bring them in at night.
Thoughts about our apartment: would have been nice if it was clean when we moved in. But Kelsie and I cleaned it after we had all our stuff put away, and it was much better. It looked like mice had been living there and were leaving nest droppings everywhere. No mouse holes though. There are lots of mosquitos in Italy, and sometimes we get a lot in our apartment. We were keeping them away with a mosquito coil, but it really bothers Kelsie, and his mom told us there might be pesticides in it, so we halted that really quickly. We're simply shutting the windows and doors at around 7pm, and it seems to keep them at bay. If one gets in though, watch out little insect cause it gets violent in our apartment. They don't seem to bother Kelsie, but all the bites I got swelled up pretty badly. My whole left arm looked like I was a recovering heroin addict. In one spot there were about three bites and they all swelled up and blistered, and oozed a lovely puss for a few days. I was very attractive.
Italy is pretty damp in general, and we live on the main floor so it gets even damper. When we did laundry our clothes would still be wet two days later. I'm not even exaggerating on that point. The walls are so high in our backyard that the sun never reaches the clothes line, and we're not home when the sun is hitting the courtyard. And you can't leave your clothes outside if you're not home because it rains so sporadically in Italy that you don't want them to get wetter (learned from experience). So you have to dry them inside where it is really damp. It made our clothes stink - mildewy and nasty. Our sheets were always damp when we got inside them. It was pretty uncomfortable. Luckily I have very nice parents who took pity upon us and helped us out by offering to pay for a dehumidifier (deumidificatore). Ours is small, but very powerful. In one night we had to empy the tank twice for fear it would fill over night, which it would have had we not emptied it. Even after the first few hours you could feel a difference, and it was great. I'm excited to do laundry so that my clothes won't stink anymore.
Our apartment, like all Italian apartments, is accessed off the main street by a giant door. It is big and green, with a tricky little lock that only my magic fingers can open (actually Kelsie is finally getting the trick). Once you open this big door you are faced with a long dark hallway. At night time you can see a light off yonder in the distance, like a lighthouse beckoning the ship home. Stroll down this corridor and you face a wrought iron gate (not rod, like is commonly misunderstood by people like me, whose big brother corrects me only to learn ah ha, he isn't smarter than me, our dad had to correct him too!) that opens up into a small, quaint courtyard. It's entirely brick/terra cota/some sort of natural looking material on the ground, and slops in the centre to drain the water that gathers after it rains because this courtyard is under the tuscan sun (I knew I could work it into a sentence very casually). Our door is on the left (don't go in the right hand door or you'll be in Susanna's apartment, our Icelandic neighbour ya!) and the left and opens into another door, that leads into a hallway/mudroom type place, and after that there is yet another door (feel like you're in Fort Knox yet?). That door is the door to our kitchen. It is pretty cute, and has all the necessities. Like a gas stove, teeny tiny university-residence sized fridge, cupboard with rusted pots and pans, Ikea plates and bowls, a wooden slab for a table, plastic chairs......all in all pretty spiffy for what we were expecting.
Take two steps up and welcome to our bedroom! By day a cozy couch, by night a bed! Wonder of wonders, talk about a functional apartment eh? A few feet away from the coubed you'll see the single bed, which we use as a couch to watch Italian television (which is really just English television dubbed). Sometimes we'll watch Much Music, which in Italy plays only 5 songs repeated throughout the day. Sometimes they have a dating show on, and I think the point of the show is for really unattractive people to tell the rest of the world why they should date them, and then those people pick a song to play. Anyway, back to the apartment. Beside our television and bed there is a make shift closet, covered by curtains. Our washroom is next to this, and I am pretty impressed with it. Aside from the mold on the ceiling it is in pretty good shape. We have a little washing machine, a sink, a toilet, and even a bedet! You're supposed to use it to wash your butt, but not being European and not accustomed to this we simply cleaned it, and use it to wash our feet at night or I use it to shave my legs. We have a shower that you have to get at by stepping down half a foot. It takes f o r e v e r to heat up and usually ends up burning us and freezing three times in a four minute shower. VERY impressive heating systems here.
If you'll allow your mind to wander back to our coubed.....directly behind it there are a set of french-italian doors (because they're not big enough to be french, but open like that). These open into our cute little backyard. It is actually really pretty, or could be, if we weeded it and planted something nice. It is surrounded by fairly tall brick walls, and there is some sort of ivy growing wild all over it, but it looks really beautiful. We have a couple friends that live out there - Giovanni the lizard, Roberto the black cat, and then another orange cat who looks like our old cat Rusty (by our I mean Trudy, Melissa and me) only a lot fatter, if physically possible. The cats perch way up high on the top of the ledge of the wall, and we've tried (okay, just me) to coax them into our yard but so far it hasn't worked.
We actually have three pets of our own anyway. We bought a basil (basilico in Italian) plant named Tony, a thyme (timo) plant named Tasso, and a geranium named Isabella (who doesn't get much sun so she sleeps all the time). We put them out in the courtyard during the day and bring them in at night.
Thoughts about our apartment: would have been nice if it was clean when we moved in. But Kelsie and I cleaned it after we had all our stuff put away, and it was much better. It looked like mice had been living there and were leaving nest droppings everywhere. No mouse holes though. There are lots of mosquitos in Italy, and sometimes we get a lot in our apartment. We were keeping them away with a mosquito coil, but it really bothers Kelsie, and his mom told us there might be pesticides in it, so we halted that really quickly. We're simply shutting the windows and doors at around 7pm, and it seems to keep them at bay. If one gets in though, watch out little insect cause it gets violent in our apartment. They don't seem to bother Kelsie, but all the bites I got swelled up pretty badly. My whole left arm looked like I was a recovering heroin addict. In one spot there were about three bites and they all swelled up and blistered, and oozed a lovely puss for a few days. I was very attractive.
Italy is pretty damp in general, and we live on the main floor so it gets even damper. When we did laundry our clothes would still be wet two days later. I'm not even exaggerating on that point. The walls are so high in our backyard that the sun never reaches the clothes line, and we're not home when the sun is hitting the courtyard. And you can't leave your clothes outside if you're not home because it rains so sporadically in Italy that you don't want them to get wetter (learned from experience). So you have to dry them inside where it is really damp. It made our clothes stink - mildewy and nasty. Our sheets were always damp when we got inside them. It was pretty uncomfortable. Luckily I have very nice parents who took pity upon us and helped us out by offering to pay for a dehumidifier (deumidificatore). Ours is small, but very powerful. In one night we had to empy the tank twice for fear it would fill over night, which it would have had we not emptied it. Even after the first few hours you could feel a difference, and it was great. I'm excited to do laundry so that my clothes won't stink anymore.