Mtv Cribs?

OK, so I´ve had requests to hear about what my living situation is like. Let me describe so y´all can get some mental images...pictures pending.

The apartment building:
It is deep in the barrio los Remedios on the corner of c/ Virgen de Aguilla and c/ Virgen de la Antigua. It´s in a pretty good location, next to a Pacific Tapas restaurant/café, a Champagne bar (which I have yet to checkout), a sports bar (ohhh Cadillac), a chocolatería, and Albi Sur (a small grocery store, think Saveway from Ravinia). We´re a block away from a main street called c/ Lujan which is a huge shopping mecca with many other conveniences. The building is pretty nice, modest and simple. It is 8 stories tall with large balconies for every apartment (important since everyone here uses clotheslines, no dryers). We first enter through a gate that always stays open, then we need a key to enter the first door during the night and siesta (it remains open with a doorman during other hours). Then we take an elevator up to the 7th floor. The elevator is interesting, it doesn´t have a button you press to get it, it is activated by sensing touch. Therefore, if you´re wearing gloves, it can´t read your touch. It needs flesh, it´s weird. Then, there´s a simple door that you pull open to get into the elevator when it gets to your floor. Now, the elevator opens like a normal elevator, it just has an additional door that you open yourself for security reasons. The elevator is pretty slow and takes awhile, and also there´s a weird step up into the elevator that, like clockwork, I trip on every day. Oh me. The elevator, like I said, is slow and also sensitive, so if you move around a lot in it, it will shake. When it gets to your floor, it kind of bounces and it makes your stomach do flips everytime. I love it! The elevator doors open, then there´s another door that you have to push open yourself. We live on floor seven unit C. The door is really large and it doesn´t have a handle that you turn, when you use the key it moves the little clicky thing that opens the door. The key is kind of difficult and you need to jiggle it a lot to get in. The security here is pretty good, the doors, since they don´t have handles, are self-locking, and they also have additional padlocks (which we don´t use).
The apartment:
It initially seems pretty small, but it is actually a nice sized apartment. Maruja lives by herself, but houses both Spanish students (Marta and María del Mar, aged 28) and exchange students. When you walk in there´s a small seating area that nobody really uses with two antique chairs and an antique painted chest. The hall leads you to the left, and whenever we enter at night (light is expensive, so we don´t turn them on) I, again like clockwork, always run into the chest. Then, on your left is the kitchen and the bathroom that Stacey and I use. You walk a bit more and on your right is the living/tv room and adjacent dining room along with door to the large porch. On your left is another little bedroom that´s not being used right now, a row of closets, our room with Marta´s across the hall (a pretty large bedroom), then María´s on the left (also large), and Maruja´s across from María´s. At the end of the hall is another bathroom for the two girls and Maruja--it´s much nicer than ours, with a real showerhead which makes me very jealous.
The kitchen:
It´s large and yet modest. It doesn´t have a dishwasher, and the fridge-freezer is definitely something out of the 70´s. The washing machine is in there, too, and it is very small and probably from the 60´s. There´s also what looks like a food warmer, but we´re not sure, and it´s definitely around 40-something years old. There´s a large pantry that´s mainly used for kitchen stuff instead of food...Maruja only keeps enough food in the house to make meals. It´s interesting how much space we take up in the states with useless snack foods. Maruja has none of that. Next to the washing machine is a fold-up double-decker tray on which Maruja serves food. There´s a pretty modern range and oven, definitely no more than 10-years-old, and it´s electric.
Our bathroom:
Well, it´s blue. There´s a badé (spelling?) which, having also gone to 2 hotels in Spain, is very typical of bathrooms here. The sink is pretty large with a nice sized shelf above it on which we store contact lens accessories. There´s a toilet whose flusher is not very strong, and it´s a chain that you pull because it´s one of those toilets with the plumbing system thing located in some overhead box. So if the flusher is broken, unless you´re insanely tall, you´re kind of screwed. The other bathroom´s toilet is normal. There´s a large cabinet next to the toilet which has many-a-time caused me to drop things in the toilet. I´m a mess here, sometimes. She supplied us with a bathmat and one towel, which is as thin and as large as a bathmat. Stacey subsequently bought herself a new towel, and I stuck with the dinky one since I had brought a large, warm robe that I keep hanging in the bathroom. The shower is one of those part bath part shower things. It has a thin shower curtain that does the trick. Plenty of storage space for our bath supplies. Like I´ve said, the peg that holds up the detachable showerhead is broken, so it remains in a little holder on top of the bath faucets. There´s a window in the shower that always stays open, so the bathroom is always cold (especially the toilet seat!). There´s, thankfully, a spaceheater in the bathroom to use after getting out of the shower, but it´s usually not a problem because it gets so warm and steamy in there. Luckily, hot water is not an issue. The only pain is the fact that all showers are strategically taken one-handed.
The living room:
My favorite place in the apartment. It´s attached to a typical apartment-esque dining room and the large balcony (where we shake off the table cloth after every meal). It has a red couch, two large red, soft chairs, and a large, soft, blue chair. There are two regular, wooden seats on the side of the room to use when we eat at the table in the living room. It´s a large woden table with a huge beige cloth over it and a glass sheet on top with a couple of photos of Maruja and her just-born grandchild underneath. The long tablecloth is key because under the table is a powerful spaceheater. So you watch TV/read/eat with your body under the table, and you put the bottom of the tablecloth around you like a blanket. María del Mar frequently falls asleep on the couch with the bottom of the tablecloth draped over her like a blanket so that her whole body gets heat. The TV is new, and the DVD player is new, too. Maruja doesn´t have cable, but all we really watch is the news and "El Corazón del Invierno" (a pop culture news show that´s on during lunch hosted by a Daisy Fuentes look-alike with insanely long legs). During meals we always watch TV. The TV rotates, so when we eat in the dining room we can watch TV. Before meals, we all set the table. We know that it´s time to set the table when Maruja pushes out the cart of food, she retreats back into the kitchen to do some more preparation and we set the table: tablecloth, cloth napkins, forks, knives, spoons, the whole deal. Maruja has her own special napkin, and she´s particular about which bowl/plate of food goes to whom. She also always serves herself first. Besides that, rules at the table are pretty non-existent. People talk with their mouth full, elbows on the table, etc. etc. Maruja also eats very fast and usually ends up finishing all leftovers of everything...she typically doesn´t make a surplus, and always wants all of the food to be gone. I guess leftovers are not a big thing here. After lunch, Maruja turns the TV down (but doesn´t turn it off, kind of silly) to say a prayer. She leads it, speaks really quietly and reall fast, and María del Mar and Marta repeat something back really fast. I don´t know what they say, it`s so quiet and so fast. María del Mar and Marta don´t seem to concentrate too hard, they watch TV as they say it. The prayer reminds me of how we used to say the Bierchat (spelling?) after meals at Camp Chi. After meals we shake out the tablecloth, fold it and the napkins and put them away, help her scrape dishes in the kitchen, wipe down the cart, and then fold it up and put it away. She does the dishes which is a bit time consuming.
Our bedroom:
It´s a fairly nice size. It has two old, twin beds set up side by side with a little wooden nightstand w/ drawer and desk lamp and a little thin rug in between. The floor, like the rest of the house, is tile and gets reeeeally cold, so we always wear thick socks, shoes, or slippers around the house. The room is pretty retro, the main colors are that popular mustardy yellow and brown from the 60´s. Our beds and mattresses are old, so they´re bumpy and creaky but still quite comfortable. They´re also very dusty. In fact, our room collects dust like it´s its job. Our beds have many layers of covers since we don´t have down comforters, which is surprisingly warmer than having a comforter. We have a sheet, 2 (or 3?) wool blankets, and a knit, brown plaid blanket on top. We get one pillow which is actually pretty large and comfy. Above our bed hangs a (approx.) 2x1 painting of the Virgin Mary holding a Baby Jesus. Our walls are all white. We have a medium sized round table with two old chairs, a long mustard-colored tablecloth (like the one in the livingroom) and a space heater underneath which we just discovered the other day and has made our nights so much better. The table is vinyl top. It sits next to our large window that has really confusing wooden blinds that took us forever to figure out our first night, but they block out light and cold extroardinarily well. We have two antique wooden armoirs which are definitely ages old and very nice. One is medium sized and we use it for random storage and shelving, the other is large and is used as a closet...and it has soooo much space and a mirror built in. We have 2 sets of shelves, one wooden, the other metal (most likely a recent addition to the room). We also have 3 sturdy coat hooks. We´ve really made it a home, adding as much decoration as possible--random necklaces hanging, postcards from the Prado standing against bookshelves, etc. We usually set up our laptops on the table next to the window, take in some sun as we overlook the streets of los Remedios as our legs and feet stay toasty under the space heater. We also keep cereal and granola bars on hand so we typically snack on them as we do so. It´s a really great room, very comfy, and it feels like home. In fact, my apartment feels like home. It´s very modest, but extremely comfortable. I love it, and always look forward to coming back and getting into the little routines.

So, I hope that that was detailed enough, hehe. I promise that I will have pictures up. Aaaaand that´s where I live!