Where We Live

Theres 2 1/2 of us who live together. Paul and I stay together, and Ben is here about 1/2 the time. Paul is one of my best friends from high-school; he just graduated from Penn. He's staying here with me through April. Ben is a rising senior at Dartmouth and is here for a month longer. He spends most of his time working at the school that I'll tell you about later.

So when Paul and I got here, Ben had already cased the joint out and found a couple good places for us to stay. We wanted to use the internet at home (so we could apply to med school) which meant we settled on the first place we came to. Its called Lamada and its hilarious.

Lamada is a hotel with apartments. What that means is we basically live in a glorified hotel room all the time. If you see a picture of the place, or walk around, it looks awesome. But as soon as you spend more than 15 min here, you start to notice things. Nothing works. As I'm currently typing this, there are 2 guys flipping the power on and off and messing with switches cause 3 of the lights in the main room don't work and no one knows why. The main overhead light stays on all the time cause they forgot to put a switch in for it. Other funny shit includes-- no door handles, a sink fixture with no pipes, and bathroom sink in the kitchen.
But don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. This place is 1000x what we expected coming here, so its more entertaining than enraging. People come in all the time to fix something, tell us theyre going to get a wrench or a cord, and then never come back.

That brings me to the staff. We're not actually sure who runs the place or is in charge, we only know the people we see every day. We've got:

Stephen: Receptionist, first guy we met. Probably about 20, speaks pretty good English. If we ever ask him about anything though, he just "HAHAHA!!!"s at us until we finally go away.

Fake Manager: We don't actually know his name, we just know that he's the main guy we talk to, that he acts like the manager, and that he's not. When we asked him why the internet goes out all the time he shrugged his shoulders and set "Its a 3rd world country!"

Patrick/Joseph/3 other guys: The technicians. Always in to fix the internet and what not, but they have no actual expertise in the area. The just fiddle around on our computers til they get bored and then leave.

Mr. Martin: No idea what he does. Not even actually sure he works here, he just talks to us a lot. Unsure of his real name, except that the first name he introduced himself as "Mr. Martin. Mr. Martin Luther King! Hahahahahaha!!!!"

Terry: Receptionist. Shes probably about 20 years old and cares less about her job than the people at the DMV. They have some rule here that theres 24hr reception service, which means that she has night shifts a lot. She gets sheets and just lays out on the floor and goes to sleep.

So thats our apt. All in all, its a good time and a lot of fun. As much as we might want to get angry about the total lack of any work getting done here, people joke around about it so much that its hard to get mad.