Do you live the itinerant expat life? Do you safari from country to country? Then you will know the joys of expat housing, and appreciate how fascinating, frustrating, discombobulating it often is to move into a house or apartment in a new foreign country.
The view from our balcony
While sojourning in Palestine, we had a gorgeous apartment in Ramallah — roomy, modern, with a fabulous kitchen and a spacious master bathroom. It had a huge balcony that I planned to transform into a Garden of Eden with lots of potted palms and flowering plants, just like you see in fancy gardening magazines.
Perched high up on a hill, the apartment offered magnificent views of the town and every evening I was treated to a glorious sunset while chopping onions and smashing garlic.
Mediterranean sunset from my kitchen window
You can feel it coming, can’t you? Too many adjectives. You’re right, it wasn’t all great and wonderful. Come with me and I’ll show you, but. . .
First let me say this:
Yes, I know Palestine is in deep trouble, with tragic events, and people living in miserable conditions. Yes, this is a lighthearted story from a privileged foreigner. Yes, I am aware of that, so don’t send me nasty letters. We were not living there for the fun of it; that’s another story.
So here’s the tale:
Life in Maison Ramallah
I love my heavenly Ramallah apartment. However, it has a few drawbacks. This may be hard to believe, but really, you can’t have it all, not even in the land of milk and honey. To tell you the truth, the pink carpeting is a bit, well, boudoir-ish. I’m not a boudoir-ish type of gal. More importantly, we have no telephone and no hope in either hell or heaven of getting one. (No, not even that way.) And my Garden of Eden plan for our balcony is a dream gone with the wind. This because the desert winds come tearing across with such power that even chairs and tables are blown from one end to the other. My first and only potted plant lay ravished in a corner within a few hours of its arrival.
Free concerts!
When the wind blows, which is almost always, the assorted paraphernalia on the flat roof make an unbelievable racket.
Daily concerts on our roof
Television antennas, water tanks, electrical wires, solar heat panels, and other mysterious thingamajigs creak, clatter, groan and screech in the wind, a concert not easy on the ears. At night it sometimes keeps me awake.
But that’s not all
When the cacophony on the roof does not keep me from slumber, it’s a wedding celebration in the park in town, which will be accompanied by loud music for all to enjoy. It’s very cheery really, and you’d want to dance to it, but not at one o’clock in the morning. If there is no wedding and no wind, the various mosques in the surrounding area still wake me up at four or five as the muezzins chant their call to prayer over scratchy loudspeakers, competing with each other.
But hey, that’s only at night. In the day time we struggle with a grouchy water heater and temperamental plumbing.
There are a lot of problems in the Holy Land, I’m sure you know, but the one you don’t hear about is the plumbing. In many public places with old plumbing (even in Israel proper some places), you are instructed, implored, to not put toilet paper in the toilet. Please, pretty please, put it in the wastebasket. Signs in Hebrew, Arabic, English, German, French . . . . even cartoons for the illiterate.
Or what?
Toilet paper, mind you, in the wastebasket. Otherwise the pipes get plugged. The pipes must be the size of garden hoses, I imagine. Unfortunately these instructions go for many old private residences as well, and we were told about it by our charming landlady. Do not put paper down the toilet she said in perfect English. I did not believe it, of course. I had nice soft dissoluble paper and there was no way I was going to not flush it.
Let me assure you it was a wrong decision. Which is not to say that it didn’t work for a while. It did. Then it didn’t anymore.
It was a moment of truth
The plumber came and tried to unplug the system. And tried. Then tried some more. Disaster followed in the form of an explosion, which rendered the pink bathroom no longer pink.
The rest of the story does not lend itself to telling. Just use your imagination. Suffice it to say that for days I smelled of disinfectant in which I had bathed lengthily after cleaning up (also with disinfectant). The plumber? I don’t remember. I blocked it out.
Okay, no more about the plumbing. Or the racket on the roof. Or the nocturnal music in the park. Or the muezzins waking us up at unfriendly hours of the morning.
Except let me just say this:
If you want things the way they are at home in your own country, then stay home. Otherwise shut up. And I will.
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NOTE: I trust most of you globetrotters have experienced similar expat housing disasters, and probably worse ones. Do share them!
It’s good to know that we’re not the only expats who go through these things!! Our last flat had water problems – leaky roofs, broken pipes, no water pressure, too much water pressure… *sigh* Then one week when we had future colleagues staying with the water dried up entirely!
We had the toilet paper in the waste bin in India and it *still* grosss me out!
Yes, I can visualize everything you said. Poor plumber and poor YOU. We couldn’t put toilet paper in toilet either and I still after 4 years back in California, keep paper in wastebasket from time to time.
I really need to come back here and take time to read everything!
You are bookmarked now!
So well written! I completely relate to the plumbing issue. No flushing of toilet paper is the norm here in Thailand too. Wish I could say I followed those instructions from the start! Fortunately there were no plumbing visits involved, just lots of plunging!!
I hate not being able to flush the toilet paper. It is such a hard habbit to break as well.
Hi Everybody,
This was fun — sort of! An experience like this makes you appreciate well-functioning modern plumbing. You also learn that even without it you can adapt and survive!
We have hired a summer cottage here in Sweden and there is a dry WC, which means NO toilet paper in the toilet. So, I’m getting used to putting the paper in the bin instead!
Still, that isn’t so bad. When I lived in China we had NO toilet paper at all! Now – that has scarred me for life!
Oh, my! It makes me appreciate the deficits that I groan about after having moved to New Zealand.
I probably won’t stop griping about other things, but I will always be glad that I can flush toilet paper!
We live just across the sea from Israel and your experiences in Palestine sound so much like life here it’s a little eerie. We also have competing muezzins in the early morning hours, complete with ear-splitting feedback from their microphones, and solar heating panels and satellite dishes that rattle and clang in the gale-force winds that wreak havoc here every few weeks. I’ve given up on trying to grow tomatoes on our balcony; when we’re at work, they invariably get clobbered and it’s just too sad. But lucky us: our plumbing is fine and our carpets are not pink! Had… Read more »
We live just across the sea from Israel and your experiences in Palestine sound so much like life here it’s a little eerie. We also have competing muezzins in the early morning hours, complete with ear-splitting feedback from their microphones, solar heating panels and satellite dishes that rattle and clang in the gale-force winds that wreak havoc here every few weeks. I’ve given up on trying to grow tomatoes on our balcony; when I’m at work, they get clobbered and it’s just too sad. But lucky us: our plumbing is fine! Had that toilet paper issue in Japan as well.… Read more »
@ Mary Witzl, you too with the noise on the roof and the muezzins and all the banging and clatter. When thinking of traveling or living overseas, who imagines having these sorts of experiences?
We dealt with toilet paper/wastebasket issue in Colombia, South America. Not an easy thing to get used to. While traveling in Egypt a lot of places didn’t have toilet paper. You carry your own or use the bidet. Just can’t get that down pat…. Loved Egypt and we would love to live there. The people are great and it’s all so interesting.
Hoi Dutch girl! You have been around the world and had your toilet-paper adventures it sounds like! Come visit again; I’ve got more stories, not all about TP. Groetjes.