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I am
...getting rained on in Tokyo.
...old enough to drink alcohol but not old enough to know when to stop.
...blogging since 02/22/03.
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Monday, August 30, 2004
Today's "to do": Carrying a lot of boxes, driving to Brussels, nervous break-down
Okay, breathe deep, focus...
Trying to brace myself against "The Move" is like not minding a hippo to tap-dance a musical on your intestines. Too bad that I won't have any internet to document the havoc tonight.
In order to take my mind off the forebodings of doom yesterday, I met with an old friend that I haven't seen for a long time. As one of his friend works at Deutsche Post, we did some sightseeing and got into the the Posttower, looked at lots of foreign mailboxes and enjoyed the panorama. The real object of interest in the Posttower were the high-tech elevators though. Going up and down so fast, it almost felt like riding a roller coaster. Interestingly enough, the speed of the elevators had already been reduced after frequent incidents of stopping them after lunch to let "the cleaners mop up".
posted by Bunny at 7:24 AM
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Friday, August 06, 2004
A long and tedious story of my university student life
I expect more interesting times to come. And by "interesting" I mean frustrating. Next week I'll start looking for an apartment in Brussels. Add a limited budget with that and blend to make it a nerve-wrecking experience of a life time. Let me recount my last apartment hunt:
France, 2002: TJ and I naively expected finding an apartment to be a painless experience which would take two or three days. With the even more limited budget of two exchange students, we were shown a fine assortment of rat holes. In our youthful optimism, however, we never lost the conviction that the right apartment was out there somewhere if we just looked hard enough.
We found an ad for a cheap furnished apartment. We immediately contacted the landlady who was nice enough to arrange a meeting that evening. We arrived at the address on time and waited for half an hour without anybody showing up. After a while a homeless lady approached us.
Life hadn't been kind to her. One of her buck teeth was black and she had a squint so strong that it must have interfered with her stereoscopic vision. Her clothes screamed "crack whore". I almost said "Sorry, I don’t have any small change" before she introduced herself as the landlady.
When she opened the door of the apartment the odor of mildew and dirt wafted into the hall. We passed spotty walls which had large pieces of rotten wallpaper coming down. The trash on the floor made crunching noises under our soles. We made a stop in the kitchen where she rubbed the blackened surface of the hot plates while she explained to us that "The apartment needed to be clean up a little."
A moldy, rectangular piece of rubber foam was propped against a kitchen wall. The scary landlady referred to it as "one of the beds". We left in a hurry and never called her back.
Our search appeared to have ended when we found an apartment that was situated perfectly. The landlord couldn't show it to us because he was on vacation but he assured us that he would send pictures and the contract soon. Satisfied, we returned to Germany.
It was weeks later that the landlord realized that he had mistaken us with another pair of German exchanged students that were also interested in the apartment. Needless to say that we drove to France for a second time.
Second attempt: Another apartment that we wanted to see led to another encounter with the not-so-homeless queen of rat holes. She didn't recognize us (Kids, remember: drugs are bad for the brain!). We had to go through the process of looking at rotting wall paper again. I must have been involved in some kind of genocide in a previous life in order to amass such a bad karma.
posted by Bunny at 11:43 AM
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