Apartment

Despite an e-mail to the contrary, I was able to get into my housing the evening after my arrival. Our neighborhood is full of 5-6 floor apartment buildings (6 if there is a business on the ground floor) that are square and six have apartments per floor. The buildings are spaced far enough apart that the sun still shines into the streets and into the buildings. It’s really kind of nice. The more standard large apartment buildings are springing up on the edges of town, but we are located just across from the large Gaziantep University. In fact, it would appear that our building is geared more toward students. In fact, there are two Polish students and a Hungarian sharing one of the units.

Our building is new. It’s solidly built, but the plasterers, painters and installers of bathroom appliances didn’t clean up too well after themselves. Those who moved in earlier bought a bottle of some sort of solvent to remove adhesive, plaster and paint from sinks and tiles. The bottle is floating around the building somewhere. I especially need it for the bathroom and kitchen sinks. Looks the workers used them to wash their tools.

All the units have about the same layout. They are basically two rooms plus bathroom. When you enter my little abode, you find a countertop with a sink and two electric burners on the wall immediately to the right. There is a student-style refrigerator under the counter and cabinets above. That’s the kitchen. Fine with me because I don’t plan to do much cooking. Otherwise the living room contains and IKEA like table, chairs and coffee table as well as a very solid sofa that makes into a bed. It’s not an American-style hide-a-bed. With this one you pull out the seat and the back comes down. I slept on one like it in our Basel apartment and my grandmother had one in her rooms in the old Bonneyville in Tacoma. The ironic thing is that it has a wall mounted TV connected to a satellite dish on the roof. You can get hundreds of channels, including English, German and Russian-don’t want to miss any of those soccer games. The bedroom has two single beds, an IKEA-style wardrobe and a kind of nightstand (about two feet wide) with two drawers. These are great for underwear and T-shirts. Otherwise no drawers.

The bathroom is interesting. It’s tiled floor to ceiling. One half has the standard sink and toilet. It the far corner they have mounted a shower head, and there is a drain in the floor. There is nothing to keep the water from flowing into the rest of the bathroom. I’d brought along a towel, which I used as kind of a dam. (They provided nice Turkish bath towels – can’t complain about that.) I suppose the theory is that the floor is slanted so that the water drains into the corner, but that’s sure not the case in my apartment.

I also have a small balcony. It would probably hold only a chair or a clothes drying rack but it’s nice to have the door to open up to let in air. There is a minaret somewhere nearby because you clearly hear the calls to prayer. Today(Friday) I heard it at about 5 AM and again at around 6:30 and 8:30 PM. It’s not the blast that come through my hotel window my first morning here. But you definitely hear it.

One thing this building shares with all the new apartment buildings popping up like mushrooms at this end of town is a very mysterious and seemingly unrelated mixture of “stuff” on the roof. I use that word partly because I can’t think of any way to describe it but partially because it seems to be just dropped there without much thought of order. It is, in fact, a bit unsightly. First are the satellite dishes for TV reception. On some buildings they look like they are hanging over the side of the roof. There is a certain randomness to their placement. Then there are these metal frames, each holding two metal large metal canisters about the size of two 50-gallon barrels laid end-to-end. Some are bright silver, others red or yellow, a few even rusty. Some buildings have more than others, and some frames have only one canister. Finally there are large square solar panels. I’ve heard two stories about what’s going on up on those rooftops. Both say that the canisters hold our hot water supply. Some say that the solar panels are supplying all the electricity for the apartments in the building; others say they are just heating the hot water. In either case, they are a step ahead of us in providing power to apartment buildings. This certainly is an idea spot for solar energy.

Back to the important part: I have beds for visitors but don’t expect any gourmet cooking. However, you won’t need it. There are lots of inexpensive and good places to eat around here.