The Apartment

Written 11/22/09

We live on the second (top) floor of an apartment. It’s four units wide, so there are 8 units total, all of which are occupied by other JHS faculty and families. It’s a little silly to have an apartment in a place like this because of the importance of roof area for rainwater, but a lot of the construction that the Ministry of Education does here is not very well planned out. That said, aside from the water issue, the house is very nice. It was built only a year ago, so everything still functions pretty well. Being on the second floor is really nice, too. It’s slightly cooler than the first and, when we open our front door and our porch door for a cross-breeze (which is 100% of the time), we don’t have our house open to the noisy children and animals that are ever-present around us.

The two things we cannot keep out, however, are cockroaches and ants. The cockroaches have not been too bad, fortunately. They’re almost always stay out of sight during the day, and some weeks are better than others. The ants, however, are *always* around. When I sweep up dirt from the linoleum floor, some of the dirt always starts to crawl away. I try to corral most of them out the door, but it doesn’t really matter if I get a few of them out, because there are always more. There is one nice thing about the ants, though. When we kill a cockroach, we can always count on the ants to take care of the carcass by morning. They’re like our personal cleaning service. The only way in which the ants are irritating is that for some reason, they really love the pitcher of drinking water we keep out on the counter. If we don’t keep the lid on, they’ll kamikaze into it to get a drink. Then others will go to retrieve the carcasses of their friends, and we’ll end with a mass of ants in the center of our drinking water, held up by nothing more than surface tension. If we didn’t have to drink that water, I’d love to just add a little soap to it and watch them all drown. But sadly, I have to just scoop them out and drink the water.

The prevalence of ants in our house (and every house here) makes me realize how much of a feat it is that there can be so many houses in the US that do not have ants in them. My apartment is pretty solidly built. It’s clean and new, but it never had so much as a fleeting hope of keeping ants out. So what makes houses back in the States able to do it? Is it all due to the climate? Or is construction really that much tighter? I’m guessing it’s mostly the climate.

Another unanticipated nicety about my house is that it’s small enough so that it only takes about 20 minutes to clean. 30 if we mop. I can’t imagine having to deal with a bigger place than this, especially since dirt gathers so quickly here.