Hotel Paradiso...
So we pulled up at this building:
It actually looks kind of quaint from the outside.
And there was a cute little corner store and video store next door.
Another bright red convenience store across the street. I love how whole buildings are painted crazy bright colours here!
On our first morning there (before we found out how much we would be paying) we were served a cute little breakfast of palta (avocado), crackers and cups of tea. We thought they were being welcoming when really they were just buttering us up to hit us with the price.
The crackers had Santiago printed on them ...just in case we didn't know. :P It was very cute.
This was the view from our room's door out into the little court yard. You can see one of the mangy cats sitting on the chair in the middle of all the junk.
The top level had a window that just kept creeking really loudly all day and night.
Otherwise the courtyard areas where sort of quaint, though they needed some work.
We found out that the man who had been staying in our room before us (who had for some reason left very suddenly)... had left a lot of his stuff there... and he would be coming to pick it up. So suddenly one afternoon while we were trying to have a nap a couple of strange chilean men came into our room and started moving out furniture and things. We assumed that the lady who ran the boarding house had kicked him out so that she could rent the room to us at a higher rate.
For this reason, while the man was there, Matt asked him how much he had been paying and he said 65,000 chilean pesos a month (which is about AU$130). Then he asked us how much we were paying. We were paying 56,000 a WEEK (which is about AU$110). That meant we were paying AU$310 more than him a month. O_O We were rather pissed off and so was he for being kicked out. Way to run a boarding house! >_<
By this stage we had vowed to find an apartment before the week was up since we had already paid for a week.
Again the view from our room including the mangy cat that woke me up one morning. It had somehow gotten into our room and was under the bed scratching it's fleas or lice... or whatever it was infested with. I just heard a strange repetive sound coming from under the bed and the bed was shaking ever so slightly. I was like what the...? Then the mangy cat came shooting out from under the bed and was freaking out trying to get out of the room. o_O
One day this same part of the courtyard in the photo had some ghastly, unidentifyable slab of meat left on the ground in the corner. I can only assume it was for the cats, although they weren't touching it. : /
Here's the hallway from outside our bedroom door. We stuck a little Australian flag on the door. ^_^ As you can see our bedroom door looks like french doors. It had been french doors but they had converted the room inside into two rooms so that our part only had half of the door. This also meant that the makeshift wall they had put up between the two newly formed rooms was paper thin... and full of little holes and cracks. Disturbingly, some of the holes were at eye height. Peepholes!? o_O
The thinness of the wall meant we could hear EVERYTHING through them, even when the girl next door farted. >_<
Here is one of the bathrooms. This was the first bathroom I was introduced to and had to have an ice cold shower in on our first day. Needless to say I was reasonably unimpressed. Thankfully after a few days we discovered a better bathroom inside that had (sometimes) hot water if we lit a gas thingy.
Here is the back courtyard... which doubled as a laundry.
Yes.. that bathtub was the place to wash clothes! >_<
And so, of course, here's Matt slaving away washing the clothes. Bwahahahh
LOL
An old man upstairs's underwear.
Here's us all happy, even though we're lying on a lumpy bed that kinda sagged to the centre. :D
The room... and on the left that dodgy wall with cracks and peepholes.
The other half of the room. I liked the red curtains. :D
Dolly didn't like the hovel. She refused to come out of her box. : /
After nights and nights of endless noise (including weird sounds that sounded a lot like the guy upstairs moving furniture at 3am) and little sleep, we were going nuts. So then of course, just to make us crazier, the bed somehow seemed to be infested with something that was making us itch. This was after the mangy cat had been under the bed so I have to suspect that it was to blame. Anyway, we tore the sheets off the bed only to find that the bottom sheet had been made of old fabric flour bags sewn together! :O
O_O
At about the same time, the drinks we were buying from the local store suddenly started having faulty lids on them. So that you'd turn it and turn it and it wouldn't screw off. It was hot so we had to gouge open the lid and drink it through the hole. o_o
Here's little Pepe (that's what we've named him anyway), the poor featherless lovebird I mentioned in an earlier post. His cage was in the big long hallway and he was always looking stressed out of his brain. When we later asked at a petstore why he might have no feathers they said because he is stressed or alone. Lovebirds always need to stay in pairs and poor Pepe was all alone. :(
Kind of reminds me of me before I met Matt. :P hehe
We will be going back very soon to rescue Pepe. We're going to buy him a mate and keep them in the apartment here. I can't wait to nurse him back to health and watch his little feathers grow back. Poor little guy.
While we were staying at the hovel we did manage to get out and about a bit and take some photos. I'll include some of the photos of Santiago tomorrow... then I'll have to show you guys our new apartment too! :D
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kittycat_black) wrote,
amused
