Our Apartment

We wanted to give everyone a tour of our place…and since you aren’t here, the best we could do is to give you a virtual tour. Before we begin, here is the floorplan:

When you come in, you are looking at, essentially, the kitchen. It is rather small…perhaps 1.5-2 meters wide and 3-4 meters long. In it we have a BIG refrigerator (about US sized…that is huge for here), a round table with four chairs, a stove, 4 burner oven, and cabinents. We also have a pantry off of the kitchen and an entrance onto the balcony.

Our kitchen	A view showing the sink, stove, oven, etc….

One really odd thing is that the sink faucet turns LEFT for cold and RIGHT for hot. This is exactly backwards of every other faucet in our apartment and backwards of what we are used to. From what we can tell, this is done because there is a mini-hotwater tank under the sink and that is just how they do it here.

If you turn left when you come in, you will see this. The entrance to the bathroom and a wardrobe. We store shoes, coats, and books in the wardrobe. The bathroom is fairly self explanitory. Although if you look closley at the wall, you will notice some switches:

The switch on the right is for the light in the bathroom (yep, it is outside.), the switch in the middle is for a heater in the bathroom (which also has it’s own on/off/temp. control in the bathroom), while the switch on the left is for the hot water heater. Here electricity costs 4-5 times less from 10pm to 6am than at any other time of the day so people tend to want to turn things off while they are gone or not using them. We are trying to adjust to this by using our hot water like Serbs. We’ll heat it at night and use it in the day. That works out ok as long as we don’t take marathon showers.

	While we are here, I might as well show you inside the bathroom. On the left is the whole view of the bathroom. You can’t see the washing machine (it is in the bathroom) or toilet. On the right is the hot water tank. (on the right of this text as well as on the right of the picture). Below is a closeup of our shower head. I don’t know if it is low flow or not, but you get wet. it also has nice water pressure.

If you leave the bathroom (or enter and turn right) you are essentially looking down a long hallway. The hall is probably 2-4 meters long. Along this hall are our two bedrooms and a HUGE mirror. Lydia’s room is the first on the left and our room is at the end of the hall. Each room is close to the same. On the inside wall there is a huge wardrobe to store clothes in (no chest of drawers here) and the bed is opposite that.

Lydia’s bed	Our bed
a wardrobe

If you turn around from our room, you’ll bee looking into the living room. In the picture to the right, you can see a better view of the mirror. One other thing you will notice is the doors. Serbs don’t like a draft (they think it will make them sick) so when they do open a window, they’ll shut the door. If you look closely, you may be able to see that the doors all have lips on them. This helps to seal the doors up better to prevent drafts.

Our couch, chair, and trunks we are using as coffee tables	Our TV and some computer stuff

By now, I’m sure you are wondering about our windows, view, and balcony. What does it look like? What do they see every morning? Well, I have saved it till last because I think it is just awesome! We are on the 5th floor (6th if you are counting the way we do in the US, but 5 here) and have a great view of the city and mountains around the city. Way off in the distance you can see two mountains…Ovcar on the right and Kablar on the left. Ovcar was what I rode walked around last time we were here. And from Kablar, there is a tremendous view of Cacak.

[Update 05-28-2008 10:15:14] I posted some more information on our apartment here .