Nuances of Home

Outside of the palaces I have toured, I am pretty positive that I have never been in a house as large as the one I am now living. The thing is massive. I mean, it has an elevator! I’m not kidding. For the first few days, I continued to get turned around as to which way I was supposed to go to get where I was hoping to get. Our bedroom? Where was that? Is this a closet or a toilet? And I am pretty sure we have at least two bideas. (I say at least because we believe, but cannot confirm, that one of the showers also has a bidea.)

The owner is an older woman – a widow with an extensive number of children and grandchildren. I had thought we were the first renters, but apparently, two young airman rented the house for a year before us. They attempted to sell the house at some point in the near past for somewhere in the neighborhood of a million dollars. I am not exactly sure why the matriarch decided to move out, but we get the impression that she is now living with one of her children due to her decaying health.

The landlord does not speak any English. She or her children or grandchildren have been by the house numerous times to help with a few issues. Each time, they bring someone who is supposedly the “English speaker” but their English is not really existent. I have yet to learn any Portuguese, and when I try to talk, I end up bubbling up something in Turkish nearly every time.

The house has some interesting facets that will make living here fairly interesting. Here are some of the "quirks" of our new home:

• While the stovetop can be turned on by turning knobs, the oven itself must be lit with a match!
• There is no air conditioning and no heat in the house.
• Most of the windows do not have screens -- very European. So you are supposed to leave the windows open but no care about the flies.
• We have the European rolling shutters (can't remember what these are called?) on every window and door. This allows you to have total black-out conditions when you sleep or total security. But then you cannot really let air through. So you have to decide -- dark or cool?
• In the winter, it'll be the fireplaces keeping us warm I suppose.
• The Base would provide us with a washer, dryer, and refrigerator upon request if the house is not listed as having one. The house, however, is listed as having them. This means the Base will not give us them. Sigh ...
• The refrigerator we do have is very nice but very tiny. The washing machine is incredibly strange and leaking water and having some technical difficulties, and the dryer is the strangest looking thing I have ever seen. Right now we are making due with the refrigerator. (We have a separate large freezer that will suffice just fine.) I am doing wash at Kristy's and drying on the line. But we're going to have to do something about the washing machine. What I fear is that the owners will fix it, but it is still the strangest looking contraption I've ever seen, and I'll have to use it. No idea how this is going to work out yet.
• We have a clothesline, and I am hoping to use this quite a bit -- especially now that we pay the utilities (instead of the Base covering our costs.)
• We are going to have to concoct some sort of gate in the garden to keep Scrubs out of one section; this one section is low enough that he can jump the wall. I had always heard that Dalmatians were gate jumpers, but now I’m witnessing it first-hand. I was out in the street, and Scrubs wanted to get to me, and the dog flew over that wall like a stinkin’gazelle!
• We bring our trash out to a big trash bin that is their four our entire section of neighborhood.
• If we want to recycle, there are bins to do this about three blocks from our house.
• Our garage is a two-car garage. When one of the doors opens, it actually comes into the house and blocks the hallway leading to the house.
• There are light switches everywhere. I really need a label maker. Badly.
• The house came with a huge TV which is good because you need a European TV to get the European channels. Our American TV will be used downstairs for AFN (the Air Force TV station.)

In other news, our UB (unacommpanied baggage) arrived this past Friday. This is 1,000 pounds of important stuff that we wanted to have quicker. Only problem was, much of the important stuff we had told them to put in UB wasn't there. We are really hoping that they are in the big shipment. These were things like our bikes, transformers, and some additional kitchen "stuff." As for our big shipment (called HHG -- household goods), no word on when it is going to get here yet. It must be on a boat somewhere still.

We are continuing to receive some of the boxes we mailed. It's like Christmas every time. (Although many times I can't help but thinking, why did I bother to mail that?

As for our vehicle, no word on that either. JB is riding into work with Nick each day, and I'm just not going anywhere. Kristy and Nick just bought a second vehicle a few months ago. We are discussing buying a second little "island bomb" as well. The Base is about 10-15 minutes from our house, and JB and Nick, being as they are the only two doctors, won't be working the same schedule all the time.