Kodintapainen hankittu

No nyt on sitten onneksi loytynyt uusi asunto, josta siis jo aikaisemmin kerroin ja jossa mies on asunut parisen viikkoa. Tahan asti on kuulemma vaikuttanut ihan ok-paikalta, tosin takan korjaamiseen taisi menna huoltomiehelta viikko ennenkuin viitsi tulla paikalle. Mutta lammot ovat pysyneet paalla ja suihkutkin ovat pysyneet kayttokunnossa.

Hyvin "generic" olohuone, jossa mies huonekalujen puutteessa kamppaa ilmapatjalla :)

Kyseessa on eri kaupunki, kuin mista meidan alkuperainen asunto loytyi ja harmittavasti tama uusi paikka on aika keskella ei mitaan. Ensimmaisesta asunnosta olisi paassyt kavellen kirjastoon, nyt meilla on minimiehen kanssa kavelyetaisyydella vain lahipuisto. Muualle emme sitten paivisin paasekaan, koska mies vie auton mennessaan toihin ja esimerkiksi lahimpaan kauppaan on 30 minuutin kavelymatka. Toivotaan, etta alueelta loytyisi kavereita minimiehelle, yksin on kovin tylsa leikkia puistossa. Asumme aika lahella army basea eli kompleksissa asuu paljon military porukkaa, toivottavasti siis myos perheita lapsineen.

Meillakin siis lahto lahenee, enaa kaksi viikkoa kotimaa-asumista jaljella, iiks... ja nyyh :( 

Asunto-ongelmia

No niinhän siinä kävi, ettei asunto ollut sellainen kuin toivottiin :(

Alue oli kuulemma todella kiva ja ulkopäin asuntokompleksikin ihan mukava, mutta heti muutettuaan mies alkoi huomata pieniä ikäviä juttuja. Asunto oli itsessään siisti,  mutta hyvin kulunut. Esimerkiksi parvekkeen ovi ei sulkeutunut kunnolla, vaan siihen jäi sellainen torakoiden mentävä kolo, josta tuli myös kylmää ilmaa oikein kunnolla sisälle. Marylandin talvet eivät ole mitään lämpimiä eli pakkasta on varsinkin öisin reippaastikin.

 

No nämä pikkujutut olisivat varmaan olleet korjattavissa, mutta toisena päivänä tuli sitten isompi juttu. Mies meni aamulla ekaa kertaa suihkuun ja vähän ajan päästä huoltomies koputtaa oveen, että suihku on laitettava käyttökieltoon, koska vedet vuosivat alempaan asuntoon. Ainakaan viikonloppuna asialle ei oltu tehty mitään.

 

Mies lähti perjantaina sitten samantien etsimään uutta asuntoa. Hän on nyt alustavasti varannut tämännäköisen asunnon meille:

 

 

Asunto on hieman kalliimpi kuin tuo ensin varaamanne, mutta sille nyt ei voi mitään, koska ei tuohon vesivahinkoiseen paikkaankaan voi oikein jäädä. Tällä viikolla varmaan selviää päästäänkö vanhasta asunnosta eroon ja saammeko tuon uuden asunnon...

 

Näistä huonoista uutisista huolimatta toivottelen

 mukavaa alkuviikkoa kaikille :)

 

 

p.s Viime yönä sain vielä lisää "hyviä" uutisia vanhasta asunnosta eli lämmitys oli lakannut toimimasta ja asunnossa oli +10C, jippii...

 

Apartment hunting online...

Since our current "home base" is in Nebraska and we are all in Finland right now, we have been hunting for an apartment in Maryland online. Not an easy task I can tell you.

 

Not being able to visit the place you plan on calling home for at least a year or so (12 month leases are rather common) makes it a bit tough to make a decision. We found several potential places, but upon closer inspection they turned out to be not what we need or want. We first found a place with an excellent location (8 minute drive to husband's office!) and with good ratings from apartmentratings.com. Our wonderful friends (thank you so much! :) went to take a look at it and took photos and everything looked great. That is, until I probed the elementary school a bit better. While the school had gotten a decent grade (6) at Greatschools, the reviews were not good, not good at all. So we had to pass on that apartment.

 

Next we found one that was a bit further away (25 minute drive) from husband's office. The elementary school was great and the place had gotten great ratings. So we contacted them and got a nice quote from the manager. We thought about it overnight and decided to go with the place, since we were running out of time. We contacted the place again and the lady we spoke the day before was not there. The new manager told us the prices change every day and today the price had gone up $200 a month. The rents in Maryland already seemed outragious to us, so adding another $200 to our monthly expenses didn't seem like a smart thing to do. So we had to look elsewhere. We first looked at the same town, but couldn't find a good place to live in. The places were either too pricey or apartment ratings mentioned roaches and other bug issues. Some places looked great until I checked the crime stats...armed robberies, narcotics offenses and assaults right around the corner. No thank you.

 

Next we looked at a place that is a 35 minute drive away from husband's office. Again the schools looked great and the apartment complex had gotten good reviews. Crime stats showed only traffic offenses. Unfortunately they didn't have any vacancies fitting our minimum requirements (2bed, 2bath) and if we wanted to live there we'd have to settle for a 2bed 1bath place. We really didn't want to give up on the second bathroom, since we are already downsizing from living in a house to living in an apartment. Luckily the lady told us that they had another property in the same town and they had one 2bed 2bath available later this month. So we decided to go with that, since we were running out of time and options fitting in our price range. We paid the application fees and were approved. Now we have to sign the lease and have our signatures notarized and mail a check for the deposit.

 

This is what our floor plan will look like:

 

We are basically leasing the place blind, but husband did found out from their website that we have 30 days from the moving date to cancel our lease. Let's hope we got lucky and won't have to look any further!

 

College living, pt V - shared house

After living in the fraternity house for the summer, I moved in with the best roommates ever,  E, J and S, whom I found on Facebook marketplace. They were renting the house with B, who was in the military and heading elsewhere for the year, so I took B's place in the house. E, J and S were all in their early twenties and had met each other through the university rifle club. I had been looking at other places to live as well, but decided to move in with then, since they promised me a bathroom to myself. The three guys said they'd share one of the bathrooms and I could use the other. Sounded good to me! When I called my Mom to tell her I'm moving in with three guys, she was wondering how clean our house would be. I had gone to see other places and theirs was actually the cleanest one! For example, this other place I went to see had two Chinese girls living there and it was a mess. There were bags of garbage everywhere and the stench was horrible. So I moved in with the boys.

Our house, a 4 bedroom 2 bath, a rickety old shack :D

The house itself wasn't really much, but it was within a 20 minute walk from campus which worked out great for me, since I didn't have a car. All of my roommates had cars though, and they gave me rides to the grocery store etc. whenever I needed one. The rent was really cheap as well, I think it was $700 for the whole house, which we split almost evenly. One of the guys had a room half the size of my room, so he paid a little less.

Since the guys had lived there for a year, they had already settled in. B let me use all of his furniture, so I didn't really bring much myself. I think I just added some storage space and a tall mirror. Oh, and I did change the curtains in my room and some of the wall hangings :D They also got cable, just for me!

View to our kitchen. I'm taking no credit for the interior design, the boys did it all by themselves :D

I don't really have anything negative to say about living with the guys, they were that awesome! Right before I moved in with them, I went home to Finland for a visit, and I noticed I was pregnant. I emailed them and asked them if they were still okay living with me, even though I'd have eventually have a baby there as well. They were surprisingly cool with it, even after the baby was born and when my husband (then boyfriend) basically moved in with us, they didn't mind either. They helped me out so much, and one of them even ended up being in the OR with me, when I had the little man! Talk about the best roommate in the whole world!

One of my amazing roommates holding our lil man :)

We were a pretty close-knit team. Before little man was born, we hung out a lot together outside the house as well. We went to bars (I didn't drink duh ;), restaurants, movies and played a ton of Rock Band with friends. We also went to the Rodeo, the State Fair, car shows and I even went home with one of my roommates on several occasions, for example for Thanksgiving. His family was so welcoming to their son's pregnant roommate, I felt really blessed to have met them. I know some parents that would not have been that okay with the situation, especially since I was not married at that time. My other roommate's parents let me borrow some of their baby furniture and after I had the baby all of their parents sent me presents! We've kept in touch afterwards as well, two of my roommates even made it to our wedding. I feel like I didn't only gain three friends, I now I have an extended family in Nebraska and Kansas.

After living with the guys, I went home to Finland for a bit with our lil man and when I came back, husband (then boyfriend) and I moved into an apartment complex elsewhere in the city. The guys still visited me a lot and picked little man and I up, so we could have family dinners at restaurants. I miss those guys so much! I still can't believe how lucky I was to have such amazing, and flexible, roommates.

And that concludes my college living series :) I must say it's been a happening journey and despite some unpleasant experiences I'm real glad I got to experience it all! Thank you to all of my roommates (with the exception of German roommate T, whom I easily could have done without) for giving me such fun memories!  I miss you!

Wishing everyone a wonderful December! 

I'll be doing the photo a day challenge this month so stay tuned for that :)

P.S. Here are parts I, II, III and IV

College living, pt IV - co-ops and fraternities

After living up north for a while in a shared apartment, I got a graduate scholarship to study in Nebraska. I had never been to Nebraska before and I couldn't travel there to look for places to live in advance, so I was once again facing the reality that I would have to live in a dorm and share a room with someone. 

My scholarship covered "only" tuition, so I had to organize and pay for the housing myself. I looked at the dorms that were on the main campus and came to the conclusion that I could not afford to live in them. Luckily, the university had an agricultural campus about 4 miles from the main campus and they offered all-girl sorority-style housing that wasn't as costly, in fact it was several thousand dollars cheaper! The trick was that we as a house would work as a team and cook and clean for ourselves. Hence the cost of living was reduced to half of what it would've been on main campus.

Our all-girl house

photo from facebook

I was a bit concerned about this housing option at first, since in my previous experience, American sorority girls can be a bit catty. I later realized that my prejudiced image was due to the fact that I had been living in New England, Nebraska was totally different. Living at the house was such a pleasant surprise; there were a  couple of "you don't know Jesus like I do"-girls that considered themselves uber-Christians, but other than that the house was a friendly place, and the girls living there were a lot of fun. Living in the house seemed to be a tradition to some, a lot of the girls had had big sisters living there and some had followed their moms and grandmothers  footsteps and moved there. 

Hallway at the house, I couldn't find a photo of our room :(

My roommate at the house was B, whom I didn't have any contact with before we moved in, since she hadn't checked her emails/facebook all summer. This was the first time that I got to move in first! Our room was super-tiny, about half the size of the dorm room I had back north and for the first time since elementary school, I had to sleep in a bunk bed :D Since I got there first, I took over the bottom bunk bed. I'm a notorious sleep walker, so sleeping on top would've been a bit risky for me anyways. Despite having about the smallest room there was, we had the corner room, which was nice, since we had two windows.

Formal living room

I slept the first two nights alone in the room, until my roommate B arrived. She was a junior, who had transferred from a community college, and was really into horses and was in the school rodeo team. She was a 100 % country girl, who had grown up on a farm. We got along instantly thanks to our love of horses. The first weekend of school she took me line dancing at the local ballroom and I've loved line dancing ever since! I had a lot fun with roommate B; she took me home to her farm, I met her beautiful horses, we went shopping a lot and to parties. She spent majority of the weekends at home with her horses, so I usually had the room to myself on Saturdays and Sundays, which was fine by me. Despite having very different backgrounds, and a taste for very different kind of men (she liked big, cow dung smelling truckers), she is definitely the favorite girl roomie I've ever had. Such an easy going person and we never had a dull moment in our room!

Formal living room from another angle

Living in the house was fun too, it was such a great social experience. When we first moved in, we had a "New Women's Weekend" where we were told about the history of the house, the traditions, what to expect and got to know each other. Each new girl (a little sister) also got a big sister from the girls that were already living there, who would show us newbies the ropes. My big sister was S and she was such a sweetie. During the little sister/big sister night, she gave me a candle she had made and we lit it together to symbolize our sisterhood. I love cute bonding stuff like that :)

Upstairs fireplace

We were divided into five kitchens (there were five actual kitchens downstairs) and each person cooked for their own kitchen for a  week at a time. So basically we had to cook two or three times per semester for an entire week for 7 girls. We had to make a menu before hand and have it approved by a kitchen officer. It wasn't as hard as it might sound, even I, with very mediocre cooking skills managed it. My girls ate Finnish oven pancakes, oven porridge etc, so they got some Nordic flavor to their meals :D Besides cooking, we were assigned a separate cleaning duty for each week. Basically your duty was for example to clean up one of the bathrooms, a kitchen, a staircase etc. This you had to do everyday, but it only took like 10-20min of our time everyday, so it was not a big deal. Not surprisingly, no one ever really liked the bathroom duty :)

Study room

We had a house meeting every week and every other week we had a formal meeting, to which we dressed up for. At the meetings we went through what had happened at the house and the schedule of next week and we sang our house song. Every week one girl got a prize for making a good meal or doing their cleaning duty well. The house also organized a lot social events, we had nail polish party, panty party (secret santa style, everyone got a designated someone to buy underwear for ha) and celebrated all the birthdays and holidays together. We also had a brother-fraternity, with whom we arraigned parties, like Halloween party, together. We also had a formal dance, which was a lot of fun and the profits went into charity. The house also had sports teams and I played broomball in one of our co-ed teams with the fraternity.

Little man visiting the informal living room downstairs

After my first year there, I decided to move off-campus, since it was even cheaper than living in the house. I admit I got all teary eyed when I left the house, because I loved living with those girls! I loved the community spirit and the fact that you were never alone. The parties were fun and I feel like I got so many new experiences, which I wouldn't have, if I had lived somewhere else. 

For the summer after my first year in Nebraska, I moved into a fraternity house with my then-friend, roommate G. At that point the Triangle fraternity was using the house, nowadays it is used by another fraternity.

The fraternity house 

photo from google

Normally these fraternity buildings house only boys (the brothers), but during the summers they rent out rooms to outsiders. The rent was cheap and my workplace was within five minutes walk, so the location was perfect for me. I was at first planning on living there by myself,  but then G's original roommate bailed out and she asked me to share a room with her. G was a Nebraskan, whom I met through a friendship program for international students. We hung out quite a bit when I was living in Nebraska, but we've since lost touch. We were roommates for the summer and I don't think we could've been roommates for much longer :) We just had a completely different ideas about cleanliness. I once stepped on her peanut buttered knife that was just laying on our room floor, gross and painful... but other than the obvious differences on the perception of the word clean, we got along just fine. G helped me out a lot when I later needed car rides to the hospital etc. And later on, when I moved away from my shared house, she took my place there.

Triangle's sign back in 2009, when the house was still theirs

Stay tuned for the last part: next week I'm moving to a shared house off-campus! :)

Hope everyone is having a great Sunday!

p.s Welcome new readers!

College living, pt III - off-campus housing

When I first went to study in the U.S, I was supposed to stay in there for one semester, which got extended to a full year. Eventually I ended up staying in this particular New England town for three years. After my first year living in the dorms, I decided off-campus living was probably the way to go. It was cheaper and freer, and I could choose my roommates. At this particular university, freshmen and sophomores were required to live on-campus, but if you were over 21 (which I was) you could move off-campus at anytime. Unfortunately most of my friends, who were looking for roommates, were not 21 yet, so they still had to live on-campus. My new roommate, whom I found on Craigslist, was S and we shared the duplex right off campus with another roommate A. Both of them were New Englanders, S was from NYC and A from Massachusetts.

Our apartment complex, we had the two top floors of half the building

Although S and I shared a room to split costs, off-campus living was still not that cheap, but it was cheaper than on-campus living and that's what counted. Our modern apartment had a living room, kitchen and dining area in one floor and two bedrooms and a bath upstairs. My roommate S had once again arrived before me and set up the room to her liking. I didn't mind, since I knew I'd probably spend half the time with my then-boyfriend anyways. We both had beds (she had a double, I had a twin), desks with chairs and we shared a closet. She also had a dresser and I had a small bookcase. Basically the room was set up so that she had 2/3 of it and I had the rest. Later on I made her reduce my part of the rent because of that, and other reasons.

I have very few photos from indoors, but this is my friend's brother goofing around in our dining area. That's my roommate A's bike in the background.

Roommate S and I got along just fine, although I knew we wouldn't be best friends. She was a homebody and way too into smoking weed, which I was just not. My other roommate, A, on the other hand, became a really good friend of mine, probably cause we didn't share a room. He got us HBO (and paid majority of it), so I watched a bunch of tv with him and we hung out at in general. Neither of my two roommates were really into going out, but that was okay, since I had other friends to go bar hopping with. We didn't really have parties at our place either, because my roommates were bit of a loners, they didn't really have friends over either. I ended up throwing a party for my friends only once at our place, and after cleaning up the post-party mess by myself, I gave up on the idea of organizing more :)

And our living room, we really didn't bother with the furnishings :)

While roommate S and I did get along the first semester, the second semester wasn't as rosy. S's boyfriend from New York had basically moved into our room, and he smoked a ton of weed as well, even in our shared bedroom. He had just graduated from high school and was moving into herb selling business. I told roommate S that I wasn't interested in paying half of the rent anymore, since we had a third person living there. She got a bit upset at first, but later confessed that she hadn't told her dad I was staying in the room and her dad was paying the rent for whole room, so she had just been keeping my money (!). So she just lost a little bit of money that wasn't really meant for her anyways. We reached an agreement and I started paying a lot less than I used to. 

After a year of living with S and A, S graduated and A and I decided we weren't going to keep the apartment, since our lease was up and the apartment itself was a bit pricey.  My then-boyfriend had just finished his second year in college, so he was by then finally free to move off-campus. We found a place on Craigslist and moved into a rather outdated 3 bedroom apartment with two girls, whom we didn't really know, but who turned out to be okay. The apartment was downtown, so easy walking distance to both bars and campus, pretty convenient ;) and the rent was very affordable. Also, roommate A moved within walking distance of us to a studio apartment, so I visited him a lot. S moved back to NYC and is getting married to that same boyfriend next summer. So things worked out well for all of us.

Our second off-campus apartment. Once again, the two top floors were ours.

Next week I'm moving to Nebraska! In this college-living "series" that is :)

Hope everyone is having a great week!

College living, pt II - dorms

In my earlier entry I told the tale of extra roommates in the Finnish student housing. Needless to say that living experience ended pretty soon and I wasn't keen on ever sharing a flat like that. When I first came to the U.S, I was an exchange student, and my accommodation was organized for me.  I faced the reality that I would have to not only share a flat, but also share a room with someone else. I was told I'd be living in a dorm room on-campus and I'd share that room with a fellow student.  I emailed with the university housing and asked to have an older roommate, maybe a senior or something. Well, that backfired.

My first roommate in the U.S was a German exchange student T. She had arrived first to the dorm and got to pick which side of the room was hers, which matress, which furniture she'd use etc. That was fine with me, I was okay with my side. We didn't live in a huge traditional residence hall, ours was a smaller one. Our dorm was "suite" style, where three rooms (6 girls or boys) share a bathroom together. I think there were four of these suites on each floor. The building housed 44 students and  had one student Resident Advisor (RA) to run things. This part of the campus had 4 other similar buildings and one bigger dorm building, so there were a bunch of students living there. There was a bus connection to the main campus, so we didn't have to walk, but I often did since it took only 15mins and I appreciated the exercise after eating school cafeteria foods every day :)

Our residence Hall

from google

Our room had a bed, a dresser and a desk with a chair for each resident and a small bookcase. The bed had a "leak proof" mattress, which needless to say was not very comfortable. Most of us got mattress pads to improve sleep quality. The rooms had locks, and we kept ours locked during the nights and obviously whenever we were not there. I never heard anything got stolen from the rooms, so I assume everyone else kept their doors locked as well. There was a community kitchen with a fridge, where people did steal food from, so no one really used it, except us poor international students, who didn't want to invest in a fridge. There was also a tv with a couple of channels and couches etc. I don't remember anyone using the community space much. I think we mostly used the microwave to make popcorn.

I found myself liking living in the dorms, I loved the social atmosphere.  As for my German roommate T, well, she didn't know she was going to have to share a room and was very unhappy when she received the email saying I'd be her roommate. Although in the beginning we got a long just fine, I soon started to annoy her big time. I talked too much she said and wasn't interested in her life enough. Now, I admit that I wasn't too interested in her nephews, but I did listen to everything she said. Apparently I didn't ask her enough questions about her life... She was upset at almost everything I did. When one of my American friends let me borrow his tv and we brought it to our room, she got upset and said it would bother her. Well, the tv stayed, and she watched it all the time. She didn't like my male friends hanging out in our room, she didn't understand why I wanted to hang out with the Americans in general.  She said I was ruining her English skills with my "made-up" words (I never understood what this meant). She said my reading light bothered her in the evenings and told me to go and read in the hallway. One time I gathered courage and told her it was my room too and she yelled at me how selfish I was. I think you get the picture what it was like with her :) Luckily she was there for a semester only. After she left I became friends with the other girls in our suite, who hadn't really talked to me all semester, partly because my German roommate T had complained about them to the RA and they wanted nothing to do with either of us as a result. They had a not-so-nice nickname for her, and I had no idea how much they had disliked us both due to T's behavior. I'm glad we got that sorted out and became friends, after T left.

After T's departure, I asked for a local roommate, since I seemed to have more in common with the American students anyways. My second roommate, P, was a freshman who had just turned 18 and had started college in the middle of the year. She was such a sweetheart, I felt so lucky to have her after the fiasco with the German girl. She was super relaxed and before she moved in we emailed about what she'd like to bring to the room and if it would be okay with me. She seemed really excited to live in the dorms, as I had been before my German roommate came along. P brought a fridge, since I already had the tv, and said I could use it as much as I like. We didn't end up being best friends (she felt more like a little sister), but I really liked living with her. For example, I'm not really the kind of person that likes to hug people, but when she was crying in our room after her boyfriend had been an ass, I hugged her. We went shopping together, to the gym and made jello shots :) She was pledging at one of the sororities, so I got to follow her pledging process, which was really interesting! I so wish she'd been my roommate for the whole year and I cursed myself for asking an older roommate. 

On the whole, I really enjoyed living in the dorm. If I got bored, I had plenty of people to visit and there was always something to do. Everyone was really relaxed and offered to let you borrow their books, dvds, games and whatnot. On the downside, you couldn't really get away from them either, and everyone was really gossip-y :) And for a non-drug user, living with a bunch of potheads gets a bit old sooner than later. I swear the whole building was sometimes covered in smoke, and it was weird seeing these kids (since that's what they were) dropping acid... I often wondered if their parents knew what they were doing. I guess some did, since a couple of them got picked up by their parents and sent to rehab. After they returned to school, they went right back to their old lifestyle. I have to admit I was pretty naive about drug use before I moved to the U.S and suddenly I saw people use drugs really openly, which was a bit of a shock. More than once I got asked if I smoke and when I said no, I got a surprised look. Once a guy looked at me blankly and asked "why did you come to this school then?".  Even though I was not a user, I learned quickly who was selling what and where, it was that obvious. Watching those red eyed kids made me so sad, they had so much money and opportunities, but lacked real substance (no pun intended) and direction in life. Such a waste. Needless to say my son won't be going to this particular college, although I'm sure many of the area colleges are alike. Not all U.S colleges are like that though, I'm happy to say.

Next week I'm moving off-campus :)

Happy Father's Day to everyone who celebrates it today!

College living, pt I - Finland

I've gone to five universities; three in Finland and two in the U.S and I've tried all sorts of living arraignments; dorms, co-operative all-girl housing, shared apartments and a studio apartment. All have their perks and all have their peeves. Here are some of my thoughts on college living arraignments.

When I first started college in Finland, I lived with my then-fiance, but after we broke up I moved to a shared flat offered by student housing organization. It was a three bedroom flat in a relatively shabby part of Helsinki. You couldn't choose your roommates or your room, so I was told my roommates would be a Chinese girl Z and a Finnish girl M and my room would be number 2, the middle of three rooms. When I was carrying my stuff in I met the Finnish girl M, who said she was just moving out and she didn't know who'd move in to her room. Then I met Chinese girl Z, who said she had her friend X living with her now and then (basically all the time). I'm a flexible person, so I said that's fine. For the first week I got along just fine with Z and X, they were pretty quiet. The only negative side was the constant strong smell of Chinese food in the whole flat, my coworkers said I even smelled like Chinese food when I went to work.

 After the first week three girls just suddenly arrived and moved into the third room. They introduced themselves as J, C and R and they said they were from Kenya. So now we had 6 people living in this three person flat, with only one bathroom and a tiny kitchen. I got along just fine with J,C and R too, but Chinese girl Z hated them at first sight. She told me that the Kenyan girls were dirty, untrustworthy etc. I tried to stay neutral, even though I did notice that our bathroom stank like cat pee, there were shoe marks on the toilet seat (!) and that the girls didn't really throw away their trash etc. Our freezer was full of raw meat, so there was no room for the Chinese girls' food or for my stuff. After the first week or so, I realized my Kenyan roommates had a business going on in their room and random guys would show up asking for "black girls" at our door. Two girls waited in our kitchen, while one girl was in the room with her guest... Chinese roommates and I took the doorbell off, because the Kenyan girls' guests were stopping by at odd hours. Then their guests started throwing rocks at the girls window to get their attentions, sometimes hitting mine. I have to say I was not impressed. We discussed things in a group, but somehow it escalated into the Chinese girls yelling and Kenyan girls swearing and me trying to calm everyone down. Kenyan girls decided it was time to play hardball with the Chinese and started pouring their shampoo down the drain and writing "bitch" on their milk cartons etc. Both of the groups came to me to complain about each other. I still tried to be neutral.

One day our Kenyan roommates had written a note on our kitchen wall saying they will have a Kenyan party in our flat this weekend. I decided to go home for the weekend, since I needed to study. When I came back on Monday, our flat was completely trashed; our furniture had been thrown off the balcony, and there was food on the walls etc. I decided to stop being neutral. Chinese roommate Z approached me with a written complaint to the housing organization. I didn't sign it with her, since her complaint was very colorful, but wrote a small addition to it myself. Student organization took our complaint seriously and Kenyan roommates got evicted right away.

As you may have already guessed based on the previous tale, the eviction did not go smoothly. Our Kenyan roommates flat out refused to leave. One day when I was coming home from work, my key wouldn't work on our lock. I called the housing organization and they told me that they had changed the locks so that the Kenyans couldn't get in anymore. They told me not to open the door when the doorbell rings, because the Kenyans might try to get back that way. I had had enough, I decided to move in with my then-boyfriend and forget the whole shared living experience.

After a while, the student organization offered me a studio apartment in a brand new building. They said since I had had such a rough experience with my first place I was allowed to be the first to choose an apartment in a brand new building. I chose the one with the rooftop terrace. It was awesome, student living doesn't get much better than that :)

The building where my studio apartment was situated 

source

Next up: my experiences of college living in the U.S :)

Hope everyone is having a great Sunday!