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I have to preface this statement by saying it's not a complaint. I love it, I really do. However: this city is constructed entirely from shreds of yarn and insanity. Schizophrenic doesn't begin to describe it. The weather on this here mountain top fluctuates with a sporadic intensity that puts English weather to shame: cold and dark in the mornings, raining and windy at lunch time and then two hours of intense heat and sunshine before another frozen evening. The city itself seems almost like it was designed to reflect this changeability, with each street like a world of its own, completely independent in style and level of affluence.
In our vast apartment hunting travels, I've seen grassy suburban areas next to derelict businesses with the windows kicked in. I walked down the most disturbingly tramp and hooker filled street I've ever seen in search of one viewing. I was about to bail and run back to the metro when I rounded a corner to find a row of palatial houses, albeit with barred windows, barbed wire fences and private security systems. I persevered, although I was not feeling the neighbourhood, and when I rounded the next corner I thought I'd blinked and wound up back in Manchester. Here was a street, wide and lined with deciduous trees, with row upon row of beautiful, red-bricked, white-paned detached houses. It looked exactly like the nice part of Manchester behind Ladybarn. The flat turned out to be a no go however, and I had to walk the 200 yards back to the urban grime of the main road. It was a truly bizarre experience...
Through the apartment hunting treks, we've discovered another bizarre facet to the city: every kind of business has its own street. There's a street that has all the petshops, fifty of them all in a row, and a street with all the chair makers, a street with the kitchen installation stores, and another populated entirely with shops selling duvets and blankets, stacked floor to ceiling 60 feet up. I couldn't begin to imagine how this is a profitable economic system, as its only increasing competition. If I want a chair, and I go to the great street of the chairmakers, surely I'm going to go into whichever is closest to the metro stop and deprive all the others of my business. I have yet to see a single chairmaker or petstore anywhere other than their allotted street.
Alas, after a week of wandering aimlessly through the city, beguiled by the fact that they changed every address two weeks ago but have yet to resign most of the buildings, we have found a house. It looks set for demolition from the outside, but the inside is colourful and crowded, with the two of us, two French girls, and an indeterminate number of Colombians. The man who owns it also runs an event business out of the living room, which means it's constantly full of coloured streamers, toys and posters for bouncy castle hire. Lauren and I believe that as tenants, we should be provided with free bouncy castles, but that has yet to pan out.
The rooms are unfurnished and small but the people are friendly and the rent cost less than my shoes. One of the tenants escorted us to the mattress and linens selling street, where we loaded up on pillows (£2), fleece blankets (£12) and mattresses (£15). I cannot argue with the price... Once we were piled up however, no taxi would stop to haul us and our gear, so our Colombian guide, Mauricio, hailed a random white, windowless van, who agreed to take us home for the steep price of £7. As Lauren, one of the French girls and I sat on the floor of this windowless death-trap amidst the mattresses and garbage bags of pillows, I did wonder if I was about to become the star of a 60 minutes special, but Mauricio seemed to have it under control and the driver seemed to find the little white girls and their burdens hilarious. So now I have a mattress stuffed with factory off-cuts, and Lauren has some very fetching fake Louis Vuitton sheets, but we've started to turn our little prison cells into pretty decent rooms. There's something Spartan about sleeping on the floor with my possessions in baskets that makes me want to throw away all my furniture when I get back to England. Reading by candlelight is another surprising pro, it feels delightfully like living in the days of yore. I'm sold.
All in all I feel it has been a successful first two weeks, and we plan on using the money we're saving on rent on exciting trips abroad. So far Venezuela, Ecuador, Brazil, Aruba, Curacao, Panama and Guyaquil are all on the list, so I should be coming up with some interesting stories to tell you.
x Erin x
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