Our Apartment

Our Apartment

We lived on the top floor of an old building that had 1 bedroom apartments with small kitchens and then at the end of the building it had one 2 bedroom apartment but with no kitchen.

Bedroom

Bedroom

So the university must have improvised, because they took the second bedroom and made it into a kitchen /office.  One side was office and one side kitchen.  It had a small refrigerator, table and a china cabinet on one side of the room and 2 desks on the other side of the room.

Kitchen/office

Office

Our dishes and food storage.

It had a very large divided bathroom, one room with a vanity with 2 sinks, so we used one for our kitchen sink and the other for the bathroom sink.  We always had dishes drying on the counter in the bathroom.  Then there was another room with the toilet, bathtub and a small washing machine.

Bathroom and Kitchen sinks

Yes that machine in the middle is our washing machine. (small loads)

It had a nice sized living room with a couch and we had a TV that had cable and we had two English stations, the BBC and the national TV station that had news from the government. 

There were times when we had to wear a sweater or fleece to stay warm.

Living room.

We cooked on hot plates, a microwave and a little roasting oven.  You could bake maybe 4 cookies on a tray at a time.  That made making a batch of cookies a long process, but Chris did it many times.  We also had a crock pot, so we got along just fine.  We often had 6 people to dinner and would move the table into the living room and it was just right.   But we did eat out a lot.  We found it just as cheap to eat out as it was to cook. If we went to the student’s dining hall we could eat for under a dollar.  We didn’t eat there all that often; the food was not as good.

One of the 3 student dinning halls on campus.

A typical lunch at the student dinning hall.

We never went hungry.

But there were many other dining halls on campus that made it very convenient to eat out and were only a little more expensive.  So we usually would spend 2 or 3 dollars for lunch or dinner.  I would ride my bike over to a market about 10 minutes away and buy fried noodles and fried rice at a small stall in the market.  I really liked those noodles.  I would get them “La Da”, which means spicy.  We got invited out to eat  once in awhile and a few times we were invited to a student’s home for dinner. 

 

Eating dinner at one of my student's home, Arron's.

We did get invited out to eat once in awhile.

We did get invited out to eat once in awhile.  That is John and Carol Galbraith on the left.

We had a lot of mosquitoes and I would smash them on the walls and ceilings and so we had a lot of bloody dead mosquitoes on the walls and ceilings.  I got tired of waking up with more mosquito bites so we hung a mosquito net and slept under the net and that saved us.  We also bought a contraption that looked like a small tennis racket that had wires instead of strings and was battery operated.  If you swung it into a mosquito it would fry the mosquito.  That was a lot of fun.  We were quite comfortable there and enjoyed it and realized you can live with a lot less stuff.