All posts tagged: home & living

Chasing My Fridge

Published by Sula H.

It broke the day I had to turn it off to prepare for my travels this past summer: my refrigerator. It didn’t cool anymore, and so I knew that this was going to be on the list of things to do after I got back: Getting it fixed. Getting it fixed, however, was quite the adventure. First, I didn’t know where to start looking for someone who’d be able to fix a refrigerator. There’s no such thing as the Yellow Pages around here, and most local businesses like that wouldn’t have any internet representation. Then, after I finally managed to find someone who could hook me up with a contact, I needed someone else eloquent enough to communicate in Chinese to help me negotiate things. Which again took a couple of weeks. (You see, things around here often take time and a lot of patience.) Today, however, I finally managed to have an appointment set up and have someone come and look at my fridge. That’s when they decided they needed to take it to …

Windows And Other Luxuries

Published by Sula H.

Having spent a good part of my youth in a room with windows that had a great panorama view of the surroundings and allowed the sunlight to stream in from sunrise to sunset, I always knew how important it was for me to have a home with a lot of windows. Something that most people in my home country (and certainly I in the past) take for granted – namely the luxury of having an apartment with windows – was something that I had to give up when moving recently, and it was one of the main reasons why I probably wouldn’t have moved had I had a choice in the matter. Now, I have to learn to not only live with a lot of noise and a bad smell, but also to live with a living room that has no access to daylight, which at the very thought of it seems depressing to me. I guess, this is another one of those life lessons for me (to which there never seems to be an …

Fighting the Screen

Published by Sula H.

Guess what happened here the other day! Suddenly there were a bunch of workers busying around the old entrance (the one we used before the new lobby was ready), and before we knew it they’d set up a big fat screen right at the wall to our residence building. First, I didn’t think much of it, but on second thoughts something dawned on me: Wait! That screen sits right on the same wall which is also the wall of my living room. And sure enough, only hours later I knew exactly what that meant: A steady stream of noise began to invade even the quietest corner of my home. And that’s also when I realized that that was in fact a really bad thing. Who wants to have constant music and noise from clips you can’t even see, but which repeat every half hour or so to pervade their home and deprave them of any peace and quiet? Not only that, but the noise from that screen outside is so loud that I can’t even hear much …