The phrase, when it rains it pours, is relavent here in two different ways. The first, literally, it's been raining for about a week straight now. The other, figuratively, once one thing went wrong in my apartment, everything did. Last week I got a knock on my door from a neighbor telling me that my water pipe was leaking everywhere. After a quick glance outside my door I realized that this was true. I told her I would take care of it tomorrow since it was around 6:00pm and the working day had long been over, so we turned off the pipe all together and considered it put on hold.
The next morning around 6:30am I get another, more rapid, heavy knock on my door; same person, more rage. We usually get water in the morning around this time and my water pipe had leaked so much during this short period that it was seeping through the cement flooring onto the second floor of the apartment building.
Now here's a little background, during the winter my water pipe froze completely, blocking any water from entering my apartment at all. My landlord got someone to take this pipe out completely and exchange it for a new one, this was about 3 months ago, not enough time for this new pipe to break.
Any who, I had no idea who this man was or what his number was and this frustrated my neighbor and so she called my landlord herself. My landlord, who has been such a big help with anything I need, then called me and said her and the repair man were on their way. After replacing the pipe again, with what looks like a water hose tube and some sheep's wool mixed with cement, the water pipe was fixed, again. This was great too because I had all these clothes I was trying to get rid of and my landlord took them for herself, daughter and sister because "they're fat like me."
So, that was last week. This week my power has been off two out of three days after I returned from Tirana. Since it's been raining, I thought it was just weather related, until I did a little investigation yesterday. I looked outside to the rest of the apartment building and everyone had power except my floor. I soon got power after that and just thought maybe it took a while for it to come to my floor.
Last night my power was out from about 7:00pm on until this morning, getting ready in the dark is always a feat. I returned home for lunch and everyone's electricity was on except mine. Now this happened a few months ago when the electrical company thought I hadn't paid my bill, until I showed them I had and they turned it back on. Hoping to skip this step, I asked my neighbor if she had power, even though I saw she did, just to bring awareness to it. My power was back on within a matter of minutes. Come to find out her husband accidentally turned it off while making repairs to their apartment. Easier solution than I thought.
Also, when I returned from Tirana, my internet connection stopped working. Well, I just got upgraded to wifi and it's faster than ever! Nice. As frustrating as things can get here with the little inconviences they're usually fixedI live in one of the nicest apartments in my building and these are minor, fixable things but it's usually a prolonged solution. My neighbors are some of the nicest people that I've ever met and it's so remarkable how hospitable they are to me, even though I've lived here for almost a year. No where I've lived as ever felt more like a community than where I live now. I feel safer and more at home in my apartment thousands of miles away from everything I knew before than I ever felt in America.
