Home sweet home

Photos from the house, the flat, the rooms
Dutifully and very trustful security guy at the entrance
Description why our TV set is in contradiction to lots of studies
Grandiosely idea for self-cleaning-mechanism of our bathroom
Howto solve problems with the air-conditioners

We have a nice home in a campus of several 15 floor buildings only for international students. A compared expensive flat for this region, but we have internet included and English speaking people at the reception who are responsible for whatever we need (and complain). And as I said – English speaking people are not a matter of course (D: selbstverstaendlich)!

At the entrance of our area there is a guard taking care that no bad guys enter. At least he should take care for that, in reality if a taxi comes he opens the door and whoever can enter… I am sure that you also can persuade him to enter – no matter which language, he definitely will not understand anyway. Or you just bribe (D: bestechen) him with a bottle of beer. But at least we feel safe when we have a guard in front of our buildings, it’s all about emotionally felt security.

Our flat is nice and big – and fully furnished. I live in it with Nils, a friend from Salzburg. Generally, we are happy with our flat (very fine compared to the flat we had before). We have just one problem: Bathroom is messed up, floor is dirty – maybe it has to do something with that the door to the shower just can be closed difficultly – or, what we think, some of our party guests do it. So we two agreed to establish a Cleaning Plan for Visitors and looking forward to succeed this unique and grandiosely idea. As a start we made first arrangements and wrote down our last guests Ina and Judith, just have to tell them about this plan tomorrow.

Right now we have a big living-room with big balcony / winter garden, a small kitchen with small balcony / winter garden and washing machine. And my room – bigger than in the flat sharing community I was before… And we have a TV set. I did not expect a German channel via satellite, but at least some English spoken ones. But, there is not more than exactly one channel with English speaking moderators, and you can imagine the amount and view of information this governmental censored TV channel offers. But back to our TV set – in contrariness to lots of university studies – our TV does not lead to seclusion and isolation (D: Vereinsamung), much more – it helps to engage social gatherings. Nils is a intensely soccer fan, especially of the national league of Germany. These games get broadcasted (with Chinese commentators) nearly live, and we have a time shift of 7 hours to Austria/Germany: Perfect time to sit together after going out, drink a beer, watch a game by the way and chat about whatever. Actually, I am not that interested in soccer, but our TV set forces me to watch, I have no other possibility. The only Problem is that we have to clean very often, because even that we are the only tenants (D: Bewohner) we still don’t know who else is watching TV in our living room and just leaving crushed nuts on the ground, empty beer bottles on the table and beer caps somewhere in the corner…

We have three air conditionings inside, but at the moment we use them for heating… and the heating function is not that well developed – so sometimes the conditioners just switch and start cooling, switch off or blow bad smelling air. Sometimes the key for “warmer” is not working – several times switching on and off etc. and then we see if we need one or two pullovers… Furthermore, we have very tough mattresses – they are big and 20cm thick, but this is just to show off – the mattress just consists of a net of metal feathers covered by a thin blanket. A cold room combined with a massaging system of coil springs (D: Federkerne) as base for recovering after having a hard day (night) out is not a good decision for having good recovering sleeps…

What else we know: very bad house isolation (after just short time of not heating the whole warmth is gone), and we know that the air conditioners have energy efficiency level 5 (the most energy wasting level), and we know we have to pay extra for energy. What we don’t know is, how our bills will look like…

It’s nice that we don’t have to pay for dust collection directly before the entrance of our floor – just putting every rubbish out of the flat, and it gets collected immediately.