A few posts ago, I mentioned going in search of a pump. Well, first, out of necessity we soon learned the word for mattress — colchon, and the thing is the one in our nice apartment was awfully uncomfortable — mushy and springy. The first morning we woke up very sore indeed.
We found our apartment while in Vancouver through a real estate agency’s website — Casa Nova. It’s always a little risky committing to something for a month but thankfully it worked out fairly well. And should anyone be interested, it’s not necessary at all to pre-book. Just get here and take a week to look for a place. There are many apartments available. (A cell phone is useful. For service got with Tigo as we are told it’s much more reliable.)
Our apartment is fully furnished and includes hot water, very few linens, cleaning twice a week (that was a surprise, it wasn’t on the website) and a rooftop patio. In this kind of warm/hot climate, you definitely want to have a little spot to sit outside — a garden would be perfect but a patio is the next best thing. It feels unnatural if you can’t sit outside.
Things we have to take care of include getting a bomba of pure drinking water (a large water container), getting gas for the gas stovetop (there’s no stove), and disposing of the garbage.
There are several ways of getting your bomba…a truck comes by and you buy one. If you’re not going to be home, you can ask your neighbour to get it for you, or there’s a tienda (like a corner store) in our neighbourhood that sells them. Or you can get one at the Bodegona (supermarket).A bomba is 16 Quetzales, that’s about $3 CAD. Cheap ha?
Luckily the gas tienda is right around the corner, so we can just walk there. Whenever you have heavy things to carry, like the bomba and the gas tank, you can grab a tuk tuk — a very bumpy experience in Antigua’s cobblestone roads. Our teacher tells us that a tuk tuk anywhere in town is 10 Q and not 15 Q as we’ve been charged.
It was hard figuring out garbage pick up. Our helpful neighbours George and Renzo (from the US, Renzo is originally Guatemalan) didn’t know themselves when pick up was. I think because of the holidays everything was a little screwed up. I think we finally get to dump our garbage Monday morning. We’re just going to put it outside George and Renzo’s door.
So, let’s return to el colchon…you can find almost everything in Antigua, it is truly amazing as it’s a pretty small place. We thought we’d try figure out the mattress situation ourselves as Casa Nova was closed for the holidays. So off we went one day in search for un colchon. We forgot our dictionary so at first we had to use roundabout sentences and gestures which usually works pretty well. We discovered that spring mattresses were expensive, $200 buckuroonees. There were no foam mattresses anywhere but there are cotton mattresses…but we could only find a single size. So the next word to learn was ‘pump’which here they called ‘inflatador’ but in the dictionary it says ‘bomba’. We started asking for air mattresses. We asked by saying ‘colchon con un inflatador con pied (a foot pump). I think we found the only air mattress in town ($40 CAD) and we found a bicycle foot pump at el mercado (that’s a hard place to navigate, it’s a maze if I’ve ever seen one). Then we had to rig up the hole of the mattress so we could pump air into it — is was inches too large. Once home we tried pumping air into the darn thing…sh*t, it’s not easy. It remains in the closet unpumped — we could take it to the gas station I guess. Anyway…we talked to George and Renzo and they graciously swapped our lump of a mattress for the one in their guest room which is only 50% better. We talked to the agency and hhmmmm, they might not do anything about it while we’re here. Hmmm, what to do?
Enough of that, suffice it to say that it was a learning experience and that all the salespeople we met were very nice. It is possible to get things done here, it just takes more effort and time. And that’s the story of el colchon which I guess is not over yet!
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