We have a dining room table! We found and bought it yesterday. It's a big oval which seats six amply, eight okay, and Jens believes it can squeeze ten! Word from the agent regarding our shipment, too: Wednesday evening is when it's expected to be available. We assume that means Thursday morning. The curtains will be ready next Friday. Can you imagine, after 6 weeks of having nearly nothing, our house will come together at the end of the week! Keep your fingers crossed against any last-minute catastrophes or issues.
I took my computer in to get the screen looked at; they told me I need a new inverter but tightened the connection (it worked for about 3 minutes) and gave it back to me for the long weekend. I'll give it back Tuesday and hope they can get it done on the same day.
LL is on holidays until the 3rd, and in that time the building has suffered. We had two big rainstorms over the week, and water got under the foundation to the power wires. The electrician came and got power back the next morning, but forgot to deal with the room where the internet equipment is stored. The water went out yet again this morning, so Jens has a very plausible theory that the electrician brought power back to the apartments only - no internet and also no water pump to get the water into our storage tank on top of the building. During the first rainstorm we discovered that one side of the house really isn't sealed against rain; we got a huge inch-deep puddle inside the kitchen balcony door, and Aimee's room flooded from her windows on the same-facing wall. No water, no power and no internet - all because "Madame isn't here." Madame, a.k.a. the landlady, man, she makes stuff happen. She is pretty badass about that! She left us a list of phone numbers for plumbers, electricians, technicians - but not all the ones we need. We still need the door and screen specialist to come fix a screen that came off its tracks and seal one of the screens in a window hole that's too big for it. And one of the drawers in our wardrobe is broken, too. And the A/C unit in the kitchen trips the fuse every time we turn it on. Aaaaaand so on.
I shouldn't complain too much. We're in a self-proclaimed "luxury" apartment, for goodness' sake. We have air conditioning apart from one area of the house. We live and get along well with our chill roommate and I have a very cool friend who lives right in the neighborhood. Also in German class we have a native-speaker intern who I get to chat with; she's patient and friendly and studied linguistics too. Aimee and I talked to the seamstresses who have a shop at the end of our block and found some dress designs we like; we got some batik fabrics the same day which we're gonna have made into cool dresses. Jens just surprised me today by showing me our new ice cream maker! We need some kind of thickener to make ice cream, but could do sorbets already with juice and fruit. I'll let you know how it goes. Finally, the choir performance went pretty darn well. I was so happy to be singing in front of a crowd. We are hoping to do another show before summertime, when many people get out of town so the choir doesn't practice.
I was committed to blogging a bunch of pictures this weekend, but the main internet is out. I'm using a dongle a.k.a. internet stick from one of the phone companies now, which has a much lower limit for the amount of data it can transfer. Also, it gets tiring typing with one hand while the other one presses the "pressure point" on the screen so that the middle of the screen actually shows an image, not white blankness.
My visa is for a year but you need to get your permission to stay every two months; my time's up two Saturdays from now and I'm not sure if I should risk getting tied up in red tape at the immigration office or just take a day trip to Togo and back, and get my new stamp at the border. It's a shame, in a way; Jens and I are headed to Tanzania two weeks too late but I don't want to know what happens at the passport inspection on the way out of the country if they see an expired stamp. Ireland I'd risk, Ghana not. A friend told me to let her know if I run into trouble at the immigration office. She "has someone there, but he's expensive." Oh, Africa.
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