Homeless in Aarhus

Well, the floors in the living room, dinning room, kitchen and hallway (being one big continuous floor without interruption, should I just say "floor"?) are being refinished which means I cannot be home. We've taken up residence in CabInn, which isn't that bad. It's cheap, it's downtown so getting a shwarma and hitting the city library was no problem. But I have no control over the temperature. I'm freakin' freezing in here.

This morning we made our way to Brabrand/Gellerup to look at some apartments. Yes, we'll be moving to the last ghetto in Denmark. No, we aren't part of some gentrification project (me, gentrified? are you kidding?), husband thinks this will be a very good way to really get inside the immigrant experience, since he'd like to do a series of articles about it. I think he also has white-guilt. And he might get to practice the little arabic he knows. My arabic is limited to things you yell at tourists who walk into your excavation and things you yell at the teenage workers who would rather play with their phones and smoke cigarettes than move the dirt you just put in the wheelbarrow. I'm pretty sure I won't have to yell at someone to move their wheelbarrow or to go away because it is forbidden. But you never know. I just want to live somewhere cheap so that we can pull ourselves out of this financial meltdown.

We'd really like a two room apartment, because the three room is HUGE, 101 sq meters. Which, for normal people might not be that big, but we've just downsized and I don't have the stuff to fill it. Two rooms is also cheaper. But we cannot live in a one room - 40 sq meters. That's just madness. The apartments that small have no ovens, just two hot plates. And the laundry is located in freakin' Germany, instead of the basement where laundry belongs.

So the three room apartment we looked at today was... welll... not exactly squalid. They patched up the holes in the walls and painted it all nice and fresh. But the bathroom and kitchen date from when the building was first put up in the 70's. You step into a tiled volcano to get into the shower - which is an accident waiting to happen. The kitchen is pretty foul, but has an oven and space and hookups for a dishwasher. The management will let you take out a loan to replace the kitchen, though, so maybe we could do that. 'Cause, URG.

The perks would be the crazy low rent, the view isn't too bad (there is greenery), it was shockingly quiet and fairly tidy (a few notable exceptions, but mostly tidy), Bazar Vest, and the most interesting political commentary on the Palestinian government factions scrawled on the walls of the elevator. There seemed to be more Fatah supporters than Hamas.

So how do I feel about it? Pretty neutral. I would rather live in a prettier place, where the buildings aren't hideous concrete blocks. But it will be cheap, so cheap that we can start to pay off the debts and maybe even put some money aside like all the financial advisors advise. I won't be weirded out by the immigrants, that's for sure, I'm already surrounded by people I can't understand (and not just language-wise). But if we go with this three bedroom, I still can't have a cat. Sigh.

I'm going to have to finally figure out the bus system or learn to bike in traffic.