The Fruit of the Loom and Other Short Stories, 29Aug, Day 16

A new guy moved into the apartment on Saturday after Rosa left. My first impression was that he was polite, and well educated – he claims a PhD in physics although he now works in a bank. He’s also appeared rather finicky and effeminate. I did not think his arrival was significant enough to merit a mention until more recently.

However, since his arrival 4 days ago I don’t think he’s worn anything more than underwear indoors for more than an hour. It’s honestly all that this guy wears. If this was college, someone would’ve surely pantsed him by now, and he’d probably have a few welts from a towel/rat-tail. Seriously, who walks around in their underwear all day?! This guy will come back from work, and within 5 minutes he’s walking around in his underwear! (And I’m sharing the apartment with 2 girls.) I’m sort of reminded of Sir William from WT12 though I won’t make any speculations about what happens in his room. I’ve been careful to lock my door and sleep with my back to the wall….

But it gets worse. He’s moving into my room after I move out, but the girl moving into the room where he has been staying until I move out has begun to move some of her things in, so he’s been displaced into the living room and is quite huffed about it. So the living room is pretty much off limits, and now they’ve asked me to agree to let him move into my room a day early and live in the living room my last night in the apt. Maybe if I can find a new apartment tomorrow I can get out of here out a day earlier than planned and curtail this standoff.

It looks like we ran out of toilet paper today. I’m not really fazed by this because living in 23K conditioned me pretty well to this situation. (I always keep a spare roll in my room for situations of this type, but I’m curious to see what the others will do.) Will they just rely on the bidet, continue using the napkins from the kitchen until they to are depleted, will we begin to see newspaper left in the bathroom, or maybe there’s some other European cleansing medium unbeknownst to me? Only time will tell…

The refrigerator now smells like a burp after someone went to an all-you-can-eat buffet of pickles and Chinese food. I don’t understand where this stink comes from, but when you open the door -for even a second, the whole kitchen needs to be aired out!

Speaking of Chinese, we reshuffled language classes this week. I was promoted to the next level, but the class time is not as rich. The class is now pretty big at 11 people, and it’s dominated by Asians. I like Asians, in fact one of my best friends is Japanese, but some of these kinds are pretty hard to understand with their accent.

I made 2 trips to Monza today to look at potential apartments. Yes, I know that’s 4 hours spent traveling back and forth, but the second trip was last minute. I’m starting to run out of time, and I certainly don’t want to stay in this place any longer with fruit-boy walking around nearly naked, our burping refrigerator, and an impending TP crisis. I’d say 1 of the places I saw today could be acceptable, though a bit more than I was hoping to pay. Tomorrow I will see 3 more, and then it is time to start the paperwork.

I’ll be up before 7 tomorrow to get a train to Monza, so had better call it a night…