lesson learned...again

university housing is the same everywhere!

our building was built in 2002 & 2003, so it is gloriously new, but it was built by the laziest contractors with the cheapest building materials possible, according to the really nice woman who is on house committee who lives next door to me. it was a 25 million rand project, and definitely does not look or feel like it was, at all. this became relevant to my life when last night the city turned the water back on finally, and when i finally flushed the toilet, it flushed for the next eight hours continuously! apparently the change in pressure triggered some problem which then revealed a bigger problem... when they called a plumber, who by then had had a really long day already (it was 10pm), he found ROCKS inside the pipe components.

so on a more positive note, the water pressure here is so good it can lodge small rocks in your narrow pipes, all the way up on the third floor!

while he was replacing a bit on the top, the pipe was open and someone turned the water on downstairs, which sent an awesomely gross three foot stream of brownish water all over the bathroom, flooding it. this rocks in the pipe business happened in several rooms, i think, because he was around for a while. classy! i pay about the same rent here as i do at home (i converted it once out of curiosity, maybe us$10 less, another university real estate scam) and even though our building was built in 1913 or 1912, our shit does not break all the time. when it does look like it might break, our super calls a plumber before we even know something is broken. because he is great. because alma dropped many millions of dollars on that gut renovation a few years back and they're determined to keep major repairs low by actually fixing things when necessary.

on the other hand, though, someone may have been robbed on our floor (at home, not my floor here) yesterday, so let me not brag to you too much. apparently daryl heard the sound of "someone smashing in/at a door with a sledgehammer and/or crowbar" very very early in the morning, which understandably terrified him. especially because our huge concrete bomb shelter walls insualte a lot of noise, so i bet it was really loud. hope it was some jackass pratt kid who locked himself out trying to get into his place without calling a locksmith, but who knows. we have cameras in our lobby and elevator area, so maybe we'll eventually find out what happened.

as the plumber was finishing up, nearly midnight, my house committee friend asked if i was going to request a better room if i come back next summer to do more research-y work at wits. i replied i would probably live where all the postgrads live--in flats in melville, usually shares. they are really affordable, and a city bus runs between melville and campus during the day.

at the current rate of exchange i could rent a LUXURY one bedroom in braamfontein for us$150 less than my brooklyn rent, and that would be a really unnecessarily nice place for a student. wits is furthering my hypothesis that living on campus is always a bad idea.