Our Apartment

Our Balcony View

Today is a gloriously sunny day! We have had sunny days before, but today, it is almost *warm*. I have been cold in the apartment. Tim was NOT exaggerating. Electricity is expensive, so the weenie little heaters don’t do much. The windows are nice and large, but they are single pane and do not fit tightly into their frames. So on this first warm day of spring, I threw open all the windows and let the air in, flies and all. I even had to change into shorts ( a first here) while I exercised. Our departamento (they don’t use the word apartamento in Chile), is a 900 square-foot, 3-bedroom, 2-bathroom unit on the twelfth (top) floor of the building.

View from our bedroom

The views are wonderful. We have a wooded hill out our balcony window, and many, many, many buildings to inspect. We are just a few blocks away from el centro, so it is a little quieter (ahem) here than in the main downtown. We are an equivalent distance away from la Unversidad de Concepción, which I believe is Chile’s second-largest university. Concepción is Chile’s second-largest city (about the size of Pittsburgh), but Santiago gets all the glory. I’ll write separate posts about Concepción and Tim’s work at the University of Concepción another time.

Another back yard

Someone’s city backyard

I love being able to look into people’s back yards. It’s funny what you fine in the middle of a vibrant city. We are on a main road with a lot of buses, car alarms go off frequently in the same area not far from here, there are lots of dogs that sometimes all get riled up and bark at the same time, and there is even a rooster within earshot.

Needless to say it is a lot different that our 100+-year-old farmhouse on a patch of grass in the middle of the woods. However, there we have noise pollution of our own, including two big power plants nearby and a railroad line cross the river. I don’t hear any trains where we live in Concepción.

Here are some more photos (I cannot put them where I want to on the page – sorry):