A Bad Beginning

I live in a residence on campus. It's part of the University Residence system, one of the options you can choose from. There are four rooms around a central kitchen, and a bathroom. The furniture is minimal, so you have to bring some of your own. Then of course there's a TV, a computer, and all the rest of the clothes and everything else. Surprising how much you have to bring with you, really.

Moving in on the first day was a terrible experience. Four sets of stairs to go up, and no elevator: well we knew about that when we made our original choice. But the parking spaces dedicated for arriving students were miles -- and two bridges, 34 steps, and a tunnel -- away. So my dad decided to pay a fortune for underground parking. Now everything had to be brought up on the elevator everyone else was using at the same time. Then we had to lug it across the road and up the four sets of stairs.

Next, a 20 minute wait in a chaotic mass of frustrated people to get the key, and we were ready to begin. We knew it was going to be a zoo, because of course everyone else was moving into the same building at the same time. The real shock, though, came when we opened the door to the apartment that was to be my home.

Stuff in the drawers and the closet. Hair everywhere. Food in the cupboards. Disgusting things just left in the fridge. A heap of garbage in every room. Carpets that were sticky and made your feet black when you walked on them. And the bathroom: ugh, ugh, ugh. The problem was that the previous occupants' moving-out deadline was at noon the same day, and they'd partied the previous night and recovered in the morning instead of cleaning up after themselves. You could see that from all the bottles. And from the bathroom.

At least the previous people weren't still there. In one of my friends' apartments, security had to be called to get them out.

My mom cried. At first she refused to bring stuff up, wanting to get the room cleaned up before all my stuff went into it. But of course it was a holiday, and there was nobody to complain to, just a recording when we phoned.

My new flatmates and their families, of course, had the same experience and felt the same way. Things did improve; we worked all night to get rid of most of the filth -- especially not fun in the bathroom, I can tell you. A few days later a crew came to steam-clean the carpets -- of course, nobody had told us they were coming, and they were mad that they had to wait while we moved stuff off the carpets and out into the hallway. It took a few days for the chemical smells to go away; I figure I've lost a few lung cells and maybe brain cells now.

It's OK now. In fact it's great now. We must be the most house-proud people around, because after all we went through, we're absolutely allergic to the slightest trace of garbage or dirt. We're proud of where we live, and we've enjoyed going out together shopping for pictures and lamps and things like that. One thing too: after we'd all been through such a dreadful experience together, we immediately found that we we'd become firm friends.