Things didn’t exactly turn out as planned. The landlord told us he would be repainting and putting in some carpets afterwards. It turned out that he meant that at some undefined future date he would be painting the downstairs apartment which was going to be sublet as it is entirely separate from the rooms upstairs that I intended to use as a hostel.

This was annoying, but hey I can repaint myself. Then we discovered that not only is there no running water but the city has actually paved over the neighbourhood well. This means any and all water will have to be trucked in and stored in insufficiently large tanks. These tanks are connected through a series of complicated hoses and pipes that must be played like a church organ in order to actually supply water to things like the toilets.

On top of that the solar hot water tank is entirely separate from the rest of the system, so there is about 2 showers worth of potentially warm (Never hot) water, assuming the water was delivered and the complicated system delicately manipulated at that time to actually fill the small separate tank.

So I had a large building with no water, in a country with only 12 hours of electricity per day, stone floors on all levels, no doorknobs, locks on the outside but not inside of the bedrooms, and a landlord that stopped by a few times a day out of boredom…

Long story short I abandoned the plan and moved into the plan B apartment. It’s smaller I will grant you but has tiled floors, working doors, and best of all it actually has water.