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I rented this lovely abode with a roommate who was over six feet tall. Unfortunately, the sloped ceiling in the place was under six feet tall in all but the very middle of the apartment. At the sides of the kitchen, the ceiling was less than five feet high. Our friend down the block said he needed a steel helmet to walk around the house in.
The walls had been papered over badly with some textured wallpaper that hadn't been pushed into the corners, which weren't square. This resulted in the wallpaper tearing. The "carpet" on the floor was more like flocking, and the fuzz would actually rub off of it in spots.
Quite often, the water would come out of the shower a muddy orange color from the rust. At least it was hot.
The water in the radiators, on the other hand, often wasn't hot or wasn't there. As it turned out, there was a boiler leak. One Christmas, my roommate had to fix the house boiler himself. It had gone out early in the holiday. The hausmeister said it wasn't his job, the house manager said it was the owner's job, and the owner said that it was unreasonable to expect anyone to come out on a holiday, and to make an appointment after New Year's. My roommate went down to fix the silly thing himself, as he had worked on ships' boilers before. Of course, the whole building was scandalized that he would work on it, not being a Fachmann and all. The busted boiler and lack of heat wouldn't have even been that terrible, if it wasn't for the hole in the wall above the radiator through which one could actually see daylight.
The hausmeister didn't really ever fix anything. He did, however, deliver the mail. Drunk. At two in the morning. He would also get in arguments with another one of the housemates, who was partially deaf. This resulted in some of the loudest shouting matches i have ever heard. Once, it resulted in the hausmeister being held out the window by the deaf fellow, while screaming "Call the police, he's going to kill me!" I called the police, who said "Oh, you live in that house? Don't worry about it. This is payday, the welfare checks just arrived. They've been doing this for years. Call if he actually falls out of the window."
Among the other neighbors was a woman who introduced herself to us as being from Texas. Five times. She was as German as a bratwurst, of course. Next to her lived a Turkish guy who claimed to be Spanish. These two didn't get along, of course - maybe Texans don't like Spanish people - because the "Texan" woman would wash laundry in the middle of the night and put her shoes in the spin dryer. The "Spanish" guy solved the problem by washing a load with sand instead of detergent. The machine was broken for two years.
We didn't have a refrigerator in this apartment for quite some time, so we had sausages hanging from the ceiling and butter in the sink until it cooled off and we could store the food outside the window. That was kind of quaint. We also didn't have furniture, and slept on stacks of laundry for weeks. We did have a wardrobe closet, though - we built it ourselves with a hand drill and some lumber from the Bauhaus (German Home Depot). It went well with our edgy bookshelf, made out of bricks with wood we found in the attic storage. It was a little smelly, though. Apparently, at one time, there had been bats in the attic.
The real icing on the cake for this place is when the haus manager tried to make us pay our security problem for damage to the roof tiles. After all that - the roof tiles? Yes, Herr Hausverwaltungsdude, we were in fact out there jumping up and down on the roof. We just do those kinds of things.
Boy, I miss that place!
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