Debra asked to see some pictures of my shitty apartment in Rome and even though it doesn’t immediately look so terrible, it is. Terrible. I have always recommened the rental agency – http://bb.rm.it because I have rented apartments from them for ten years without problems, but after this experience I’m not sure that I can trust them.
The biggest problem is my own fault – there’s no air conditioning. Well, here’s my air conditioning:
It’s summer in Rome and I’m on vacation in a basement with no air conditioning, and yes, I know that I should have asked about that, but again, I’ve been renting apartments from this agency for years and have a relationship with them. I wish they would have said, “Hey, that apartment’s great but it’s about 150 degrees in there right now.”
I mentioned it’s in a basement? It was listed as ground floor, but it is more subterranean and has a lovely musty basement smell. I remedied that yesterday by adding the smell of burnt coffee – the coffee pot doesn’t work.
All of the other apartments I’ve rented in Rome have small apartment sized washing machines and decent kitchens so that I can hit the open air markets for the fresh pastas and vegetables and do a little cooking. Here, in this apartment, is my kitchen:
The “stove” has no low, medium and high settings and it seems to go from barely warm to on fire with the slightest turn to the knob. I haven’t cooked anything yet but it should be an adventure. And of course there is no washing machine; I lugged my clothes on a half hour walk to a laundry yesterday where a very nice girl charged me just 11 euro to wash them all and they were ready in two hours.
– The keys to the apartment don’t work right – “You have to jiggle them”, the landlady told me in her “jolly” manner. Yesterday I did a jolly jiggle for 15 minutes before I finally got in.
– When I asked for more for more towels the landlady told me that “this isn’t a hotel and you get one towel every 3 days”.
– The neighborhood is “iffy”. I can’t walk around here by myself at night and it’s a 20 minute walk to an area with stores and restaurants so if I want to escape this place at night I’ll have to take a cab. Oh, there’s a bus. A very, very unreliable bus.
– There are mosquitos everywhere – no one really to blame for that, I guess, but it’s not helping.
I’ve decided to take the train down to Naples for a few days and stay in a air-conditioned mosquito-less hotel on the water, and I’ll take some pictures when I get there.
I Love Italian Everything 