Home is Where Your Stuff Is

So, I moved to a new apartment a couple of weeks ago. The exact reasons for the move are too long and silly to be recounted here, so I will skip to the important bit:  I have left my beloved, bright, open-concept (damp, freezing cold, cramped kitchen, studio-style) apartment for something that I feel has a similar energy, minus the lime green and plus a few bedrooms.

After a quick calculation, I reckon this is my 11th 'home' in the last 5 years, not counting interim months spent at my parents' place over summers. That's not as bad as during the Uni years, but it's enough. All part of the lifestyle choice, of course, but there is nothing to make you loathe moving like having to do it over and over. As part of my resettlement deal, at least, I was spared the task of actually carrying anything myself, though I did feel a pang of guilt as I watched the two movers haul my every personal belonging up the five and a half floors to my new place.

Apartment hunting is sort of a bizarre experience here. Not because the places are any worse than anywhere else I've looked -  I'm sure horrendous apartments are an international phenomenon - but because the outsides of the buildings are particularly deceptive.  



Any or every one of these unappealing boxes might secretly be  harbouring spacious, beautiful, modern apartments but from the outside...there is no point in even hazarding a guess.



For example, this is a relatively new building:

It looks okay, right? There is no way you can tell by looking at this building that on the inside there are entire apartments with no windows looking onto...outside, where every single window displays a view of a very cozily located wall. It would be like living in a ceramic-tiled cave.

Of course it's difficult to escape this interior window business altogether, as it seems to be a very common design feature here. My own bedroom window looks out onto someone else's front door. Eeek.

This arrangement is especially entertaining on the central stairway, where I walk through half a dozen different conversations on my way up or down. And you hear things. Laughing, coughing, MSN messaging, dish washing...everything.



Perhaps because of the lack of sound barrier (virtually every room in my apartment has a window looking out onto this echo-y sound vortex) everyone has been quiet and respectful, for which I am infinitely grateful, though I don't doubt the day will arrive when someone has a party and I will get all uptight and gringa about the disturbance.

For now though, it feels like a good fit.