A lot has been going on, and I admit that I’ve been slacking on the blog. After the stranger-under-the-bed incident, I moved from Adyar (Shastri Nagar) to a new apartment in T. Nagar. I’m now sharing a three bedroom apartment, with 7 other interns ranging in age from 19 to 32 (that would be me). In our room, you’ll find Michelle and me in a double bed, and Neil in a single. I went from sharing a nice home with Kodiak to having 1 female bedmate, 2 roommates, and 5 housemates. It’s threes company, without any blondes but with some Real World: Chennai and Survivor thrown in.

Since we moved places its been one misadventure after another in dealing with our landlord. When I first arrived in the apartment (last week! seems so long ago!) the young housecleaning guy would sleep in the living room every night, having loud cell phone conversations, occupy the washing machine with laundry for people that didn’t live here, and do some light cleaning here and there. We had little control over who entered and left the apartment, since we only have one front door key for the lot of us. Then we had a little dispute with the landlord over some workers drinking up all of the guys’ whisky (and eating our food and taking someone’s hairdryer and people's clothes disappearing), which of course he insisted couldn’t have happened. After all, the company’s name means “trust” so how could something go wrong? [Keep in mind that this is the same man that manages the apartment building that we moved out of. He also insists that there was no man under my roommate’s bed.]

So now nothing's happening. No trash being taken out, no bathrooms or floors being cleaned, no drinking water being brought in, and they even took away the starter that you need to get the stovetop to work, so we can’t cook. It may all sound like a lot of bellyaching, but drinking tap water isn't a great idea – you should boil it if you want to use it, which we can’t do because the starter is gone. And there’s nowhere for us to put the rapidly accumulating trash of eight people, because the apartment building doesn’t have a dumpster. What to do?