apartamento

I'm renting an apartment in the city for 54,000 colones for one month. For a little over 100 dollars I get a room the size of a college single (plus small bathroom), wireless internet, hot water and access to a kitchen and washing machine. My room is one of seven and is safe, relatively clean and surrounding a tiny courtyard behind the owners house. Other teachers have stayed here in the past and the landlady, Ana is very nice. Her husband is a handy man / mariachi who also breeds canaries in his spare time. The building that the kitchen is in houses about 40 canaries and four finches in a room bigger than my apartment. They also have a very pregnant little dog.

There are lots of lizards around (I've seen geckos and little brown ones with bright orange heads), probably because there are lots of bugs around. I've seen Ana spraying for bugs, but there are still tons of dead roaches in the kitchen and thousands of tiny ants in my room. Haven't had any major problems yet, but I'm wary!

My room gets cleaned once a week and garbage changed and I didn't sign a lease and had to ask them to take my money. My shower is heated by electric coil and you can tell when the water is about the get warm because the lights dim. I'm still doing my best to remember to put my toilet paper in the trash, but still slip up sometimes. The washing machine gets filled by hose and you have to manually change the cycles. There is also a separate machine to spin dry. Then you hang every thing up to dry... The bed has a beautiful wooden headboard (all of the wooden furniture I've seen has been beautiful), really stained sheets, a flat pillow and foam mattress. Its kind of comfortable.

Anyways, overall its an experience, and while I was taken aback at first, I kind of enjoy it now. I would have preferred a home-stay, but whatever!