spare room buenos aires: the exciting conclusion OR the bartender and the bolshevik

living room with cable television
 (not just a physical cable,
but also a connection to a
paid account that transmits
television programming
into the tv for us to watch!)

you may be wondering to yourself, "self, i wonder what happened with miss dewey d and her apartment dilemna?" well, we were able to find a very nice two-bedroom apartment only a few blocks away from our old apartment. it's good because that way we still know where everything is in the neighborhood.  and i am happy to say that our new landlady appears to be a non-psycho. say what? yes, it's true.

1 out of 2 balconies

and get this, when things are broken in the apartment, she promptly sends people to fix said things.  now, that is not to say that these people actually fix the things that are broken ... on no, that would be expecting too much.  but they do show up with tools and tinker around and make loud clanging sounds as though they're hard at work.  and even though that isn't quite as good as actually having things be fixed, i appreciate the illusion that they're creating.  

living room

anyhoo, we've been living here since november and i think it is safe to say that we will not be moving into another apartment during the remainder of our stay.  (fingers crossed!)  for those of you who may have lost track, this is now the third apartment we've lived in here in lovely buenos aires.

the apartment has a kitchen, dining room, living room, two bedrooms, and two balconies (one off the living room and one off the master bedroom).

master bedroom

you may have picked up that we do in fact have a spare room in our apartment.  what on earth on we doing with this spare room you ask?  well, the bolshevik and i have taken on a flatmate who will hereby be referred to as "the bartender."  the bartender is someone we knew from nyc (yes that's right all the cool kids from nyc are moving to buenos aires) and he has a tendency to make us cocktails.  not a bad trait in a flatmate if you ask me.

kitchen (with the world's
weakest washing machine)

so all in all it's pretty amusing here in the new apartment, much like an episode of three's company, except that none of us are pretending to be gay in order to live in the building.

the bar

this brings me to a question that has been plaguing me as of late ... why did people have to pretend to be gay (or cross-dress) just to get an apartment in the 70s?  was the housing market that bad?   i think we can assume that television was accurately portraying a serious societal issue here.  i'm so glad that we live in a time where people no longer have to live a life of deception just to get a decent place to live.

this week on spare room: buenos aires edition

this week on spare room ...

miss dewey decimal and her bolshevik are forced to flee their all-in-white apartment and move into a friend's spare room.

say what?!

it's a long story dear blog readers, but basically my bolshevik lost his cell phone. (then he lost his replacement cell phone, but that's less important)  SO, even though we alerted our landlady that the phone was lost (since she is responsible for the bill, and we just pay her for said phone), she somehow believed that we were responsible for paying for the 500 pesos in calls which were made in the two weeks that followed.  apparently, telling someone that you lost their phone is not enough information, so she decided instead of calling the phone company and canceling the phone (which is in her name), she would do absolutely nothing.

good plan.

this is quite typical behavior for her.  it's quite similar to her reaction to the fact that we don't have cable (or even a television in the apartment) even though both are supposed to be included in the price of the rent.  or her reaction to the fact that the handle broke off our oven door while i was baking cookies, and then the windowpane of the oven door fell out, leaving us without a working oven for 5 weeks and counting. she is quite good at doing nothing.  

but when she came to our apartment screaming about responsibility and how we owed her 3,000 pesos (yes, somehow the price went from 500 pesos to 3,000 pesos all in the course of one argument), we decided that we'd had enough.

so we absconded in the middle of the night, in a "midnight flit" as it were, and are now taking refuge in a spare room.  this spare room also doubles as a storage room for various pieces of luggage and random personal belongings.  needless to say, adding the bolshevik and myself and all of our own crap has made the spare room quite snug.  

but fear not!  i believe we may have found a new apartment to move into next week.  tune in next time to spare room to see what happens next!