New flat-mates

Hi,

By Saturday it will have been two weeks since we moved into the new flat, i.e. into the new room :-)

The house is pretty big, it has six rooms and two bathrooms. When we visited it and decided to move in, there were only four rooms. In this country you should be very careful because you can be taken by surprise even if you absolutely don’t anticipate any. One week before we moved in the house had gotten another room :-) The landlady made a well-trained joiner devide the big living into two parts so that she can have extra 150 dollars income a month and we have to share the two bathrooms with two other people. Not good news but that’s for now.

A very young Australian couple lives in one room as they have decided to move together and try what life is like together. It seems they spend only 2-3 days a week here. They don’t make much trouble. I don’t understand what they can do in that room anyway :-)

A manual worker from New-Zealand lives in one small room. He is fine, nice and talkative, but he uses the word ’shit’ at least once in each of his sentences. Talking to him during the first week was like having a conversation with a Chinese person in Chinese. I didn’t understand a word from what he was saying. Now we can understand ’shit’ clearly. Okay, other things, too :-)

In the other small room there is a very slim girl with German origins who was born in South-Africa and lived there for 18 years. She studies book-keeping at some local university. She doesn’t make much trouble either, sometimes she comes into the kitchen and watches what we are cooking :-) She only eats deep-frozen broccolis and carrots. Every day she takes out some deep-frozen vegetables, renders and eats them. She is extremly slim! :-)

A 20-year-old, Australian IT expert of a kind or programmer also lives here. I’ve only talked to him once but it went very bad. I said what a delicious ’paradise’ he was eating. He looked at me funny then he said something like: ’What did you say?’ and went on eating. The word ’tomato’ didn’t come to my mind. The guy must have thought I’m hopeless for good. :-)

A Scotch couple is going to move into the new surprise room on Saturday. So we will be able to practise the Scotch accent as well.

Besides all these there are guest room-mates, cockroaches in every room. We have been able to avoid them so far, but now they are here and live with us. The landlady has given us some exterminator and Kata has spayed the room with it, so we haven’t seen any for about 7 days.

We have banked up the room quite well. We have a lot of built-in closets and bedside tables, a quite big chest of drawers and a very large desk. The room is pretty roomy. The following week after we had moved in we found a tv set on the adjoining street outside of a house. We brought it home, I hooked it up and since then we have had a television.

The traffic is not the best around here. The blue, train-like underground doesn’t run here, so we can only use a bus or a tram. By tram it takes 40 minutes to get to the inner city, by bus one cannot say in advance how long it takes to the centre. There is a bus schedule, but it’s useless as the bus runs randomly. It just doesn’t come when it should :-)

Nowadays I get home late because in the afternoons I busy myself with all sorts of things which look like work so for the time being the flat-mates don’t disturb me a lot. None of them :-) And Kata is expecting the guests armed with the exterminator :-)

For the present we are living here. If things don’t change around us, we will move to Sydney after about 3 months. Of course it’s only a plan, but how it will be, … :-)

PS: The ’Melbourne from a student's point of view, after 3 months, part 3’ blog entry is being made.

translated by Ágnes Lupán