Strangely enough though, our move felt rather impromptu: we got home from work and decided that we wanted to move later that night. It was a flurry of boxes and packing and shoving things in the back of trucks.... and we didn't really get a chance to say a proper farewell to the Kikoni house the we had fondly dubbed "Sparkles the House."
But for some reason, leaving the place that had been my home for almost a year wasn't all that hard... And here are a few reasons:
1) the riots: any time a riot happens in town, the students at the university near my house tend to join in on the "fun" by doing stupid things like throwing rocks and the police or starting fires in the middle of the road with old tires. The riots were particularly near a couple Fridays ago.... the day that happened to also be the day that Kate and Prince William were married. We decided to splurge on our internet usage and stream part of the royal wedding live... And to make ourselves feel closer to London, we pretended that the sounds of gun shots and tear gas canisters exploding were actually just fireworks and confetti cannons being set of in celebration of the royal family's big day.
2) power outage: we were without electricity for six days straight. Then the power came on for about half a day and it left again..... Only to return in small spurts for the remaining four days. This led to a smelly, rotten fridge and lots of days spent working at coffee shops to use their power outlets.
3) landlord drama: our landlady is crazy. She does things like shows up without warning, threatens to kick us off her property, and then claims that we are like daughters to her. Schizophrenic much? And on top of all that, she's been over charging us on rent for the past five months.... And normally I wouldn't feel bad confronting someone about a situation like this. But here's the catch: she's old. Like ancient old and decrepit. She is always having health issues and seems so fragile that I feel like I can't chew her out for being completely unreasonable.
Needless to say, we were all glad to be out of the place that we had started calling "The Hell Hole." And all that made the small, teensy-weensy, insignificant problems of the new house seem like nothing at all.
Here's a link to Julie's blog with a picture of our new casa. (Sorry to have to send you elsewhere for a picture, but my Internet is currently acting up and won't allow the upload).
Lovely, isn't it? We sure think so....
The only bad experience I've had in it so far involved a rat. The story begins with a sleep over. Since we had just moved in, my bed frame hadn't been assembled properly so I moved my mattress onto the floor of Dani and Julie's new room. We thought a roomie slumber party would be the perfect way to celebrate our first night in the new house. Well, around 3:00am I woke up with a jolt. I wasn't sure what happened... if it had been a dream or not.... I prayed that it had been a dream. But I thought that a rat had just scurried across my legs. So for obvious reasons, I couldn't fall back asleep. I went out to the couch in the living room and finished the night there.I told my roommates about it the next morning and couldn't remember the details.... only that it involved a rat and I wasn't sure about it being dream or reality. Well, the reality part was confirmed when Dani was unpacking her things and found said rat hiding her her suitcase.
For obvious reasons, I will never sleep on a floor in Uganda again.
But besides all that rat drama, I love love LOVE our new house. The location is so much closer to work, it's local without being so loud and susceptible to riots, it's a few blocks from the US Embassy (a little slice of American soil!), and we get hot water + amazing water pressure at the same time.
And when it comes down to it, little things like that add up to making a big difference.
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