Moving to the city has been an adjustment for us--probably a bigger adjustment than moving to a new culture. We now have to use an elevator, and
the security of the building is such that we have a special elevator key.
To go up to our apartment, we have to hold the key pad up to a sensor, which transmits which floor we live on, and the elevator takes us to the 3rd floor.
If we have visitors, they have to call on the intercom system,
we unlock the front door, and they go get on the elevator.
We have to guess when they are ON the elevator, then call it up to our floor.
Secure. Makes me feel safe, even if a bit cumbersome.
It was just this week that we realized that we cannot
just pop over to see someone else in the
building--we have to go through that same ridiculous process.
No leaving goodies on the doorstep here!
One afternoon this past week, our intercom rang--a British-sounding gentleman was
asking to come up. Kevin was home, so we called up the elevator.
The gentleman (who is the principal of a just-getting-started international school)
profusely apologized as he handed us some felt pads for the legs of our dining room chairs.
Seems he could hear the chairs scootching in and out during our breakfast time,
which is a couple of hours before he wanted to be awake.
The funny thing was, that very morning, Alice had been imitating the chairs we could hear in the apartment above US, and scootched her chair back and forth.
Maybe we should take the extra felt pads and pass them on upstairs.
The view from our front door--quite a bit different from our Cedar Falls' view of a magnolia tree!
See that skinny white door? That's the garbage closet. There is a small trash can (about the size of my old kitchen trash can) where the three apts on our floor put our trash.
Fortunately, it is emptied a few times each day. And they use a black plastic liner,
so it doesn't usually smell. It's kind of nice not having to walk out to a big dumpster.
And we visited Home Depot last weekend. After the Wal-Mart fiasco (they wouldn't take a credit card),
we took lots of cash, and sure enough, they wouldn't take VISA either.
it's beginning to feel like home around here!
That's interesting about the VISA cards. When I was on my mission in France, I could use my John Deere CU Visa card anywhere. It would take about a minute to hit the ACH, but it would go through. When Darcy went to Holland, no one accepted Visa. And now, it seems that stores in China do not as well. Was it because of that change a few years back, when Visa increased their prices? Who knows?
ReplyDelete