Tim and the apartment

The apartment is decent and, remember, This Is Mexico! (Tim, for short)

The Good:

1. It is has 3 bedrooms.

2. All the rooms are big.

3. It has a lot of closet space and shelves inside the closets.

4. There is a beautiful, huge terrace outside my door with a covered area.

5. It is on the second floor so I feel secure.

6. It has bars on every window so I feel secure.

7. It has a metal screen door that would take a blow torch to open so I feel secure.

8. It is in a nice and quiet neighborhood of Reynosa so I feel a little bit secure.

9. It has a new air conditioning unit that is awesome and cools down the entire apartment. I have more later on how I got the air conditioning unit.

10. Lemon tree right outside the office bedroom.

The Bad:

1. I never have water after midnight until sometime before 6 AM. My neighbor downstairs has water, but not me.

2. I often don't have water at other times. I hate this when I need to get ready for school.

3. When I do have water, the pressure is often low. It can take 10 minutes to spit enough water from the showerhead just to wash my hair and another 10 for the rest of the body.

4. The light goes out often on the water heater. 6 AM cold showers are no fun.

5. The toilet is in serious need of help and it is slated to be replaced. I don't know what's growing around the base of the toilet but it might be the source of the H1N1 virus. The maintenance people were here yesterday to change it but they ordered a toilet too small. So I am still waiting.

6. It's too dangerous to take Daisy Dog out for a walk. The danger isn't because of the violence of being in a border town, but there are a lot of big, stray dogs wandering around that would love to make a taco out of Daisy. So I walk her up and down our street only. My neighbors must think I'm crazy pacing up and down the street with the taco meat on a leash.

I moved in just before August 10. For the first several days, I had no air conditioning. I have no idea how the natives live without air, but after 4 days of non-stop sweating I walked into my school and demanded that something be done. It worked! That very day I got air conditioning. Now if I could get Tim to work on the toilet and make sure I always had hot water for showering in the morning, I'd be a very happy camper. Tim, being Tim, we can't expect miracles.