The Woes of Apartment Living

...are tenfold in a foreign country

It's 4:15 in the afternoon and I am sitting in the apartment, trying not to stress out about what's going on in my kitchen.

Just after lunch I received a call from Amalia, our landlord. She said that the apartment concierge had called, that our downstairs neighbor had water leaking into his apartment, and they wanted me to come let them into our place so they could investigate. In the meantime, they had shut down the water for the entire building.

So I jumped into my car and began the hour drive home, all the while wondering why Amalia couldn't handle this problem: it's her apartment, she has a key, surely she works closer to the apartment than I do, and she speaks fluent French. I also spent a considerable amount of time worrying if I'd left any water running or flushed anything stupid down the toilet this morning.

To give the drama an extra punch, David is in Germany until tomorrow night. Just this morning I was thinking that disasters always happened in Michigan when he went out of town: Oliver brought a live chipmunk into the apartment, a bat was loose in the basement, Oliver got into a serious fight and had to be taken to the vet...

But I managed to handle all of those on my own (following a self-pitying phone call to one of my parents) and I'd have to handle this. Time to be an independent woman.

So I pulled up to the building, grabbed a flunky from the management company downstairs, and marched up to the apartment, expecting the worse.

And there was nothing. Whew! I knew everything was ok when Oliver greeted me at the door with an eager "oooh, what are you doing here so early?" look in his eyes. The flunky and I combed the apartment over and found nothing wrong. Then we went to the apartment below (not nearly as cool as ours, by the way) and started searching the ceiling.

We found the leak running a straight line across the ceiling of the kitchen. "That," I said in poor French, "is where my hot water pipes run". Too bad I don't know the word for "pipe".

So they made some phone calls and now I have two flunkies, the plumber, and the downstairs apartment neighbor's son all having a laugh in my kitchen.

Since I started writing, the plumber yanked out our washing machine and found the source of the problem. Just a leaky gasket, they say. I don't know a thing about plumbing, but the leak he pointed out (which I cannot deny, is certainly a leak) is a good meter away from the spot in the neighbor's ceiling. Well what can I do.

I talked to Amalia, who told me that there are two situations: 1. The issue is with a building, or "community" pipe, and the managment company pays, or 2. The issue is with "our" pipe and we are responsible. Either way, we won't be paying, it's just a matter of insurance paperwork.

In the end, the pipe was "ours". I wasn't very happy with the way people kept saying "the damage you've done", "it's a private issue", etc. I guess I'm just being oversensitive.

The chipper management guy was kind enough to fill in all of the paperwork for us, so now all I have to do is call the insurance company. Here comes another adventure in French. Better look up the word "pipe".