(New) Home, Sweet (new) Home!

So after various months of searching for a new place to call home, which ranged from real estate to buy, to rent, or to have in "anticrético" (Bolivian option whereby you pay the equivalent of a year's rent up-front to live in a house/apartment and at the end of the year the owner has to give you your money back or the house/apartment is yours! Apparently it's not 100% legal and has to do with a loophole somewhere, but it seems to work... And that's all I can tell you about that!)... and finally I found a dream apartment.



Located half a block away from Plaza Avaroa it is therefore strategically located to be near two supermarkets, numerous restaurants and bars, and walking distance from my Great-Aunt's! Not to mention that I can now roll out of bed and get public transport on my very street corner to go anywhere I need to go! So so practical, it's fabulous. Not to mention that it's on the second floor with two pseudo-terraces (pseudo bc you can't access them through doors but have to climb through the big windows), three bedrooms (my room, guest room and office), a nice sized kitchen, a dining-living room, and lots of closet space. A friend from the Red Cross, Carol, lives on the 7th floor, too - brilliant whenever I need to borrow things like dishes, the oven, the microwave, a phone charger, you name it.

Of course the whole apartment is a work in progress. Furniture is borrowed from Carol and Monica, paintings are scarce and not yet hung up, there are no carpets or rugs anywhere (which contributes to a cold home, I admit)... But the duck bathmat and towel in the master bathroom make it cosy, and my books and DVDs and the few framed photographs I have also give it a homey atmosphere. Soon it will be a real Home, hehe.

In the meantime it's still an amazing place to live and work and have people over at for dinner... No, some things never change.

Photos, from top to bottom: my living-room-slash-dining-room, the bathroom on the right, the kitchen (yes, it's true, I have no oven and cook everything with just two hot plates!), my bedroom (photo taken at just the right angle so you can't see my wall-closet or all the documents/things I have on the floor... bookshelves are on my list of things to buy, as is a bedside table!), and last but not least the office! Here you see Oscar and I working away... Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Life in Bolivia is fantabulous, indeed.

Note: when I moved in I didn't have all this furniture and stuff straight away, but considering I am updating my blog with some delay I thought I'd avoid emptying the apartment to show you what it looked like initially and skip ahead a few steps.