how to dwell in observatory

"Observatory is the student suburb of Cape Town and the best place to stay if you want to meet other students, interns and volunteer workers."

this is the advertisement of our housing agency, which translates: "we rip you off big time for very run down houses because we know the quarter is cool. your housemates will most likely be american and/or slightly insane and additionally not very used to living on their own. that's why they chose to book their accomodation before arrival in cape town, just to be in the safe side."

warning: there might be slight traces of exaggeration caused by slight frustration in this post.

the überfancy place pretty soon turned into a mess. especially since the promised cleaning lady hasn't come for about three weeks now. but seen that there IS a cleaning lady, nobody would care to clean up some mess themselves. after the indication that we might not have to pay for electricity, and the first weeks we actually didn't, since a few days we have to pay for electricity on our own, god knows why the landlord changed his mind (note: south africa has a funny system of pre-paid electricity. there is a metre somewhere inside your house with a keypad, and if you run out of electricity, you go to the supermarket, purchase units, get a key and type that into the keypad). so we are in a constant fight of collecting money from housemates who are never there or are actually just 'guests' of their girlfriends (but nevertheless living there) - all of a sudden, the almost deserted house became very full and we are at the amount of +/- 10 people.
3 of them - aire, sarah the candian and me, actually care for doing things like buying electricity and washing dishes - the latter one being kind of a pain in the ass because we only have like 6 plates and 6 forks for roughly 10 people. mwaaa. the number stays an estimate, since we just never MEET the people who live there, at least not all together on one spot. accordingly coomunication is a long process of writing notes and stuff. today we'll most likely run out of toilet paper, tomorrow or the day after out of electricity. i would like to watch what happens when we don't do anything - requiring strategic planning such as your private roll of toilet paper in your room, food that needs to be refrigerated being transferred to the office fridge, and a stocking up on candles. but honestly - that would be hilarious, won't it?

apart from the usual problems of cleanliness which will probably prevail as long as the shared housing concept is an option (and i wouldn't mind so much if we didn't pay a hell lot of money for a shithole which wouldn't necessarily have to be that much of a shithole), we have quite a lot of entertaining soap opera potential going on:

lily, the girl living in our granny flat is constantly having some additional people in there. not a big deal. since last week, adrian, who is actually called anne but gave up on this name ever since entering the international realm (ha! that dude is called like a girl!!!), from holland arrived. he met lily in england some time ago and is 'something like her boyfriend' (we met several of the 'something like a boyfriend' before, one knocking maniacally on the window demanding to be let into the house). he's probably gonna leave tomorrow or the day after since he's tired of her, although he wanted to stay one entire month - he's a surferdude. however, lily is seldom all his. this week it was another one of these rastamen (i confused him with the one of last week, but then i realised that last week's was already turning grey) who generally went peeing with the door open and wanted to discuss the issue of love and sex with me. because love moves the world and sex is good. it was a rather one-sided discussion. after that i had to explain for the umpteenth time that i don't smoke weed in spite of having the hairstyle that predestines me to do so...
yesterday the guy who knocked on the window a few weeks ago managed to get inside the house and was cooking pap in the kitchen. sarah is becoming frightened because lily told her that she's kind of upset about her dutch 'bofriend' being here since she is actually in love with this guy who's sitting in prison because of a rape case but will soon be bailed out. sarah now suspects pap guy to be prison guy. adrian, pap guy and lily all live together in the granny flat now. sarah claims that everybody living in our house is having a tendency towards insanity - apparently something quite common with the south-african-slash-international-youth.

i haven't made up my mind yet about the amount of insanity - i'd be more worried about a cockroach colony emerging out of the pile of dirt in our kitchen. at least we have specialists in this field: the crew living in one of the other houses of our housing agency!