Alaskan Bulgarian

The Monkey Runs Away

Well, the big, giant weight that has been Teaching in this last, boiling month is gone. School, finally, is over. The last few weeks haven't been what a sane person would call "fun." I've had little structured material to teach as I wanted June to be flexible under the demands of Peace Corp's having me run around the country and the wavering hours at school. Most of the classes have been centered around discussions I came up with the night before.

And now the grades are all in, the students have cleaned up the school, and I feel at peace for the first time since, probably, late April. Sigh. Good, good times.

Except I have no water in my apartment, and for the last few days have been a little short on dough. The Peace Corps took care of the latter problem by giving us all the big quarterly payment yesterday, but the water issue still goes on. Hopefully it will be resolved tonight after two days without a good, solid shower.

Yesterday I was dreaming about something or other when the sound of my doorbell snuck in, coming out of the mouth of whatever person happened to be in my dream at that point. I woke up, and on the third ring managed to figure out what was happening. I stumbled to the front door, grabbing my keys on the way. After unlocking my door, I hid behind it in my underwear as my landlady and a maintenance-looking type guy stood there and started talking to me. As far as I understood from their hand signals and clipped sentences, they would be installing pipes somewhere near my bathroom and needed to shut down the water in a half hour.

They left and I charged into the shower. I hurried through the usual shower process and was throwing some underwear on to my wettish self when the doorbell rang again long before the half hour was over. I asked the maintenance guy (who was with a larger group of maintenance guys at this point) for a moment and ran into the bedroom to throw on a shirt and some pants. This done, I opened the door for the guys who came in and tramped muddy shoes into my wet bathroom. One was smoking a cigarette in my apartment.

Digression: Somewhere in one of the myriad Peace Corps manuals it says to make your apartment your little haven of America. I understood the intention behind this statement and have, more or less, privately insisted on my apartment being American soil. Under most circumstances, a Bulgarian would almost need a passport to get in. Other than people I need to fix things that go wrong, I've had only one group of people over and they were a bunch of students who had a movie they wanted to watch on my laptop. Maintenance guys come in with lit ciggies and I glare. Nobody lights a cigarette in my apartment. Nobody.

After filthying up a good square meter or so of apartment space, the lead guy explained that they wouldn't need to do a thing in my apartment but they were going to replace pipes downstairs and needed me not use water for the next two days. I took this to mean that they would shut off the water, do their work for the day, clean up, and leave me with water at night and in the early morning, then shut it all off again. I was, apparently, wrong.

Later in the morning, I used the toilet, left it unflushed on the assumption that there was no water to flush with and went to the sink to wash my hands with whatever water was left in the pipes. The water came on full force and I quickly washed and shut it off. A moment later the doorbell rang again and the lead guy was standing there with his hair wet. He told me I couldn't use the water and beckoned me downstairs. There were massive drainage pipes in the stairwell. He took me into the bathroom directly below mine and explained that they were replacing the entire drainage system below my apartment, which is on the top floor. I guess they hadn't shut off the water to the building to save the neighbors from a little trouble. Anyway, I didn't tell the guy that he should feel lucky I didn't flush the toilet, too.

The biggest problem with all this is that they tore out the entire drainage system yesterday instead of working floor by floor like reasonable people. So I haven't had any water and have been relying on restaurant and school bathrooms to do my, erm, business. The guy tells me I should be able to use the water tonight, but we'll see about that. A slightly smaller problem is that I can't have the windows in my apartment open because the entire building is filled with flies attracted to the scent of a torn out drainage system lying all over the stairwell. I tried it for a few hours yesterday and had to kill well over a dozen house flies while picking up 5 or 6 mosquito bites and haven't gone near the windows today.

At any rate, this is a minor problem when the great load of School has been lifted off my shoulders. It's finally summer! Things are good.

Posted by Rob at June 30, 2004 06:33 PM