A Cave with a Stove

Since I moved into my bachelor pad (also known as my one-room apartment / crummy flat / glorified cave with a stove) it’s been one issue after another.

I moved in late last year, two days before Hannuka (and roughly two weeks before Christmas). In the last few months that I was living there my flat has slowly been falling apart. Although it is only five years old, it is falling apart due to shoddy work, I’m either destructive with the building (usually I’m destructive with myself) or someone comes in, while I am at work and purposely wreaks havoc. If there is a suspect for this theory, then it must either be the extreme right-wing pensioners who live downstairs, or the dog that lives upstairs.

Seriously, when I moved in I had no heating (in December!!!!!)… in Nicosia, which might as well have been Antarctica and Siberia combined.
In January, I had cockroaches coming up the plugholes. Then I discovered my neighbour on the second floor (not the right wing couple) began receiving small packages with the occasional sprinkling of white powder on the brown paper. Maybe it was a special type of cooking powder?
Then the air-conditioning didn’t work and neither does the heating (although I won’t need it now as the sun boils everything in the apartment as I don’t own curtains). Shortly afterwards I discovered that when I turned my immersion heater on all the lights would go out.

Then the drought got so bad in Cyprus that the authorities cut the water off, and for three consecutive weekends I had no water. It’s very hard for someone as dirty as me, to try and keep clean from Saturday morning until Monday 10pm. I used to shower at Cake’s mansion or in the gym. At least I got fit. And last week my toilet cracked and flooded my bathroom and seeped into the bathroom of the guy downstairs (who I believe is on the receiving end of those neatly-packed packages).

Seriously, in that hole it’s like I am experiencing the re-enactment of the Bible: insects, drought and flood… and no central heating. I mean they didn’t have that either back then did they?
So I with my rent I also get an adventure, which includes:
1) no heating
2) cockroaches
3) strangers in my building with odd parcels (why not use Akis Express?)
4) no water
5) water everywhere and cracked toilet
6) still more cockroaches and pesky neighbours screaming in the night
7) no hot water
8) no air-conditioning
9) no functioning toilet
Oh… the joys of independence.

Then I got thinking: Would this ever happen in Limassol?