Depto

How rude of me to leave you all for a long hiatus with that depressing Easter post as the last thing I said! Mala chica que soy!

Perdoneme! Let's move on.

Welcome to my new apartment! Here they call it a depto. This will be the first post in a series of I-don't'-know-how-many-yet-because-let's-be-honest-I'm-not-a-professional-blogger-and-I-don't-plan-ahead.

Come on in!

This is what you see first walking in the door. The apartment in on the 8th floor and it takes up the entire thang! Gasp for living the high life, hold your breath that the earthquakes stay small. 

We, being me, Isela (see previous posts), Vinicio (Chileno), Diego (Chileno), and Nayo (Chilena), have a little foyer that leads straight into a very nice sized living room with great natural light and a balcony.

This guys is greets you in the foyer. Along with two toy dinosaurs that I purchased to decorate my own room and help me with the tour. It's kind of a "Where's Waldo?" thing from here on out with the dinos. They have their own story which I'll get to later.

   

Follow them.

Here we have the living room. All of the furniture is Diego and Vinicio's and came with the apartment. Sweet gig, huh? Being here has helped me realize how important it is to me that things be good looking. I don't mean that in a shallow way. I mean it in a more artistic one. It's important to be surrounded by things (and people) that you think are beautiful and that make you happy. Maybe not beautiful in the conventional sense, because lord is that a narrow category! but beautiful and sentimental to you.

 Speaking of beautiful...the weather in these photos is not, but rest assured I will return with pictures of the balcony view on a bright sunny day and then you all will see what you're really missing. Suckers!

Here's the view down the street. Downtown central is just a few long blocks in the direction you're looking.

There is a corner café/ heladería  (ice cream!!) called Emporio Rosa right outside my front gate. Don't friends and fam! There is a building gate, a floor gate, and a front door lock. My shoulder muscles have developed nicely since carrying around my keys, unfortunately you can't see the muscles because of the ice cream.

The trees in this picture allude to the park across the street. Parque Forestral. It looks like Europe, you guys, and I ain't kiddin'. Old black iron street lamps, park benches, gravel pathways, fountains, and the like. It's a pretty big park too. Perfect for PDA (don't even get me started!) and jogging (the antidote for the ice cream). I'm very well located.

The horribly grey picture above of the hill is Cerro San Cristobal, the biggest hill in Santiago. Cerro San Cristobal is part park, part botanical garden; there is a zoo, a humongous pool, and at the top is the Chilean equivalent of the Statue of Liberty except it's of la Virgen de la Inmaculada Concepción, who people keep telling me is different than the Virgen Mary...hmm. They light the statue up at night and I can see it from our living room window, it's like my very own Roman Catholic substitution for the Eiffel Tower outside my window... only less phallic. The view of the city from the top of the hill is supposed to be pretty incredible, smog permitting. I have yet to get up there, but I'll post the pictures as soon as I do.
(P.S. Hope I didn't just ruin the Eiffel Tower for anyone. Sorry if I did, but, come on! You have to admit...)


Now we head back inside to the kitchen. Let's call this the teaser trailer, shall we? Actually the kitchen was too dirty for me to photograph when I took these pictures, but it's big, it's white, and it's beautiful. I have been cooking up a storm lately so you'll see the results of that endeavor in a separate post.

(View out kitchen window)

This is my "backyard." That little hill is Cerro Santa Lucia, and the neighborhood is Lastarria (pronounced Las-starrrr-ria. Roll those "R's" folks!). Lastarria is where they keep the bourgeois-artsy-eclectic people. It's awesome! There is an antique/souvenir market around the corner everyday in an alleyway that looks like it could be in Paris. There are cafés and bars galore. And the shopping is on pointe. It's really close to 3 different metro stations. And the section of town where all the clubs are is just a short stumble walk through the plaza and over a bridge.

Now I have seen enough interior design blogs/ magazines to know that they never show the bathroom, but if you've stayed with me through this last prolonged hiatus then we're probably pretty close or blood related, so I figure it's okay for me to show it to you.

As you can see it's pretty nice. And the thing about my housemates Vini and Diego is they're sort of in the business of flipping apartments, so stuff is always improving. They fix stuff, they buy stuff, they ask for my input! It really is a sweet gig I got here. I try to show my thanks by not taking 40 minute showers, and not burning the building down when I cook. Sometimes I give them the kitchen scraps. Hahaha! I'm totally kidding. I cook to please, and judging by theirs and Isela's reactions you'd think these people had never had food before. They gush, I blush. It's amazing. 

Alright now don't be mad at me or else my dinosaur friends will bite you, but...I'm NOT going to show you my room in this post because it too was quite messy when I took these pictures. Shocker.

Here is the view out my window though. That big coppery building is the University Art Museum complete with performance theater and museum café. The bakery I intern for actually bakes the pastries for the museum café there. Small world. I'm still trying to figure out how that should translate into discounts for me. If you have any ideas on how to spin it let me know.

So now let's talk about what's really important: the color scheme of my room. The walls are white, and the floor is a plain wood so I would have a blank slate to work with except!... 

... except my curtain in bright red, UGH! I've come to terms with something important while being here: with very few exceptions, I hate the color red. There I said it. I want to like it, I do. It's my grandma's favorite color. It's so vivacious and it looks so good in the form of lipstick and nail polish. It's also the color of most spicy things and I love spicy! but I just can't bring myself around to like it in most other contexts. I bought grey and white sheets to try and keep the rest of the room neutral. I thought I'd accent the red curtain with red flowers, or something, to try and tie the color in without putting it everywhere. But then I found my dinosaur friends in the kid's section of the store where I bought my sheets. They were red(ish) and I didn't hate them! so I brought them home to tie the red in that way. And now I'm torturing you all with this partially satisfying "Where's Waldo?" tour of my new apartment.  

I'll stop.