 Our new apartment is one-part battleship, one-part living quarters and one-part whistling teakettle.
All aboard?
It is strategically placed towards the south side of Avinida Julius Nyerere. The street, Julius Nyerere is a great place to be. It’s the same street that Chris lives on. It also is the same street which Mundo’s Pizzeria is located on… as well as the Hotel Polana and the Hotel Avinida. It’s a safe neighborhood with lots of little shops and markets and restaurants. It is the street on which we hoped to find an apartment. And we did. However, we just didn’t know what we found until it found us.
The apartment is spectacular! As we alluded to earlier, it has four spacious bedrooms, in addition to an even larger living room that doubles as a dining room, an “American-style” kitchen (still searching for a reason behind that name), two full bathrooms and two long but narrow terraces: One terrace hangs off the living room and overlooks the Indian Ocean (It is the Eastern Coast of Africa) and a little boat marina called Club Nuval and a tiny street known as The Marginale (which we call Lover’s Lane); The other terrace hangs off two of the three spare bedrooms (we hope to turn into offices even tho we have no office furniture) and they overlook (The south Side of Africa – which should be land… but is water because of) the Maputo Bay and the South side of the city or the “down-town” area which they call The Baixa (pronounced: Baisha) which means the “base-land” or “low-land”. Both terraces are enclosed with glass windows that either slide open or have horizontal glass blinds. The views from the fourteenth floor are breathtaking... and unfortunately so are the winds!
First and foremost, we love our apartment and are settling in just fine. (For example, we just got INTERNET!) Our first night in the apartment, however, was an experience only a novice (motion-sick) seaman, such as myself, could relay.
But before I do relay the epic tale in poem-form, here’s more about- The apartment is shaped like one giant “L”. Upon entering the main corridor, the kitchen is immediately on the left, the dining room and living are the second room(s) on the left and the corridor dead-ends into the master bathroom and the master bedroom is the third and final room on the left. (If it sounds confusing that’s because it is). I call this main corridor “The Wind Tunnel”. The second Corridor is a right hand turn just before the master bathroom and leads to the other 3 bedrooms along the left side with just the other bathroom on its right. This second corridor I call “The Extended Wind Tunnel -From Hell”. (And I have tried to explain this in Portuguese and it’s not pretty). Together they provide us with a cacophony of sound that is both pleasant and increasingly disturbing at the same time.
The fist terrace, like I said, overlooks the East side of the Indian Ocean and is quite windy. It’s water as far as the eye can see. Aye matie. The second terrace overlooks a good portion of town and The Baixa (which is really a giant cliff that has been worn away by hundreds of years of wind, rain and tide fluctuations (oh yeah, and a bunch of raging floodwater) and is extremely windy, the likes of which can only be compared to the winds you would face while being aboard a very small boat caught way out to sea during the storm of the century, aka “The Perfect Storm” (another pet name we have for our new abode). At first thought, you might think the apartment was governed by a poltergeist. Not so! It is governed by the wind, which as Jamy explains it, is only a form of poltergeist.
Every door that is walked through must be either propped open with a door stopper or shut tight behind you… very much like the house featured in the Nicole Kidman movie “The Others” (“I am your daughter”) less they slam closed so-damn-loud you practically die of heart failure (every single time, no matter how often you hear it) (And when it’s not one of our many doors, it’s one of our neighbor’s many doors). In addition to all this, every one of the myriads of windows that are pushed opened (no, they don’t slide up and down, they swing out to better catch the whipping of the gusty winds) and must in-turn be locked into the open position and subsequently closed and re-locked upon vacating the room. (We lovingly refer to this process as, what else? but, “battening down the hatches”). (I am both captain and first mate, as Jamy likes the wind that almost swoops us up and out of our apartment). And even with all this locking and latching and battening down, the movement (and hence noise) of the closed and locked parts (or open and locked parts) is simply absurd: Closed windows rattle in their frames; open windows rock the screws lose from their “locks”; doors that don’t slam incredibly loud, bang against the frames they loosened themselves from years ago. Our only comfort is that it has always been this way and so this is the way it must always be. Jamy and I are simply the latest sailors on a tour of duty aboard this stationary ship that is constantly journeying deep into the adventure that is simply, life in Africa. (However, my latest secret is to take the few number of que-tips we managed to smuggle aboard this Viking vessel and wedge them between all the things that go “squeak” in the night).
Remember a few posts ago I mentioned how it hadn’t rained much here in Maputo… well it sure rained the night we moved in! And we weren’t the skilled wind-management consultants that we are now... The problems started with the second air conditioner. (The first one is located in the living/dining room and works splendidly, not that that room even needs it..). But the second is located in the master bedroom and has yet to work longer than 3 minutes consecutively.
Brief note on Mozambican air conditioners: They’re cool! Ha, get it? No, really, they are! Each AC unit has 2 parts: One is generally located outside the house and the other part sits inside the wall. So the first part is the giant mechanism that creates the cold air and is big and heavy and is often resting on the ground or hangs bolted onto some nearby ledge. Then there is a little pipe that runs from the unit to the other party which is a set of oscillating vents in the wall. (Which is also pretty neat). And the whole thing is controlled by a infrared remote-control. Pretty nifty, huh? I thought so. And while at Chris’ I went so far as to wonder why this 2-part AC technology hadn’t been adopted in more countries and exported the U.S. I mean, for one, you can’t really steal it (it’s bolted down), and two, it doesn’t pose any security risks, like the average window unit does (you can’t push it through and climb in via the window) and three because of its permanence they can add new features, like a remote control and a built in thermostat… it’s great! Everyone should have one.
Which brings me back to the problem of the rain and the first night. The first night in the apartment it was windy as hell. (Again, the expression “windy as hell” is a really hard one to explain in a language you don’t have the complete mastery of, tho it does oft lead to phun conversations). Anywho, on the fourteenth floor of our building it was windier than hell! And the rains that fell that night were like large daggers being hurled to the ground. Except those daggers didn’t hit the ground (not that we noticed anyway, at night we can’t see the ground… como se dise, “bottomless pit to hell?”). Instead, these large daggers hit the large flat-topped aluminum covered air conditioner poised just outside our bedroom window! (That last sentence should be read- slow to fast in an increasingly high pitched girlish voice). I first noticed this when I woke up for my twenty-seventh time with my fingers lodged deeply into my ears. (No, I’m not kidding, I really awoke to find my fingers in my ears, isn’t that odd?). I had been having this horrible dream that someone was using a hammer made entirely of diamonds to strike against the biggest slice of steel ever conceived. So, I got out of bed for the eighth time to have a look around, again. And what I discovered to my own amazement was that this pounding noise of biblical proportions was something as simply natural as the rain falling onto the AC unit. Man, was that something I didn’t expect. I really thought I’d see daggers or diamond hammers, etc, or at thte very least, I thought for sure someone was building an extension onto his or her apartment above or below or perhaps a house even further below (you know, towards the most inner circle of Dante’s Inferno). But no, it was just the rain, falling, falling onto our completely flat, thinly covered air conditioner just outside our chamber door.
And thus so small and not proud at all
I quaffed my question not loud nor tall
As to wake the sweet Lenore, or crease
The corners of her sleeping cheeks
I simply wondered perhaps methinks
“Will this rain but ever cease?”
And though she stirred not
From out the sheets in tangled knots
I can quote the rain quite plainly here
And the noise with which it mocked my dear
Mocked me and it mocked our pain
And as it tapped a reply it made
Not so gently this sly refrain
This little song a maddening game
The same as it that it always swore
That this rain would cease but “Never More!”
However, in the end… it did cease… late the next morning. And upon our faces were creases, and wrinkles and signs of age. For although time has slowed, in Maputo age nonetheless takes its toll...
Como se dise, “happy birthday!” ???
And so, to conclude this week’s rant, that is why air conditioners belong on the inside! That and they’re a *censored* to work on when they break. So since that night we have learned to better manage our wind tunnels and are still waiting with our faces and our pulses for the man who is smart enough and agile enough to fix a broken air conditioner that is hanging off the side of one of the tallest windiest buildings in town. That, and for the internet company that is giving us free internet… to give us better free internet. I mean I know beggars can’t be choosers… but I am providing them with web work.
If you’ve read this post down to this point… god bless you! And so then you must still be hungry for more… so check out the design that won us free internet. It’s kind of phat… but it got the job done.
P.S. Moving to Africa is a phrase I can’t repeat enough, because I found that by typing it and M2A, we get picked up by search engines. Wink Wink. So expect to see it crop up more and more moving to Africa often and have a happy weekend. It is moving to Friday there in America is it not?
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