Movin on Up

Michelle and I have moved into our lovely new apartment!! It has two verandas, one on the front and one in back. The one in front is screened in and faces the city park. We like to sit in that one and listen to the sounds of people playing soccer, basketball, or local music from a grill/ice cream stand. The back veranda isn’t screened in but it does have a washing machine (which has come in handy since we couldn’t wash our clothes for the first two weeks in the other place…). Inside there are two bedrooms, but we only use the master bedroom. The other one was previously owned by a pre-teen girl and there are pictures of Zac Efron and the Jonas Brothers on the walls, haha. The bathroom is large and includes a shower that is: 1. set up like a US shower where the water sprays down over your head (as opposed to the Portuguese style of having to hold a hand unit while you shower) and 2. has hot water (as opposed to our last apartment). The living room is equipped with leather furniture and a flatscreen tv. The kitchen is a good size and has a gas stove (we will have to buy gas tanks for it) so that you can cook during a power outage. Basically, this place is really nice. We don’t have to run the air conditioner constantly because we can open windows and get airflow. See pics here. (Blogger takes a long time to upload photos and the internet connection is really slow here, so hopefully we can post pictures directly to the blog at some point!)

We are renting the apartment from a very nice woman named Placida who will be in Lisbon for about 7 months. She got her undergrad from South Carolina University and works for the Voice of America US military radio station based here in São Tomé. The street we are on is really pretty and quiet, other than the sounds from the park. Finally the name of our street is technically Rua Carlos Palmeira, but the name was changed about two years ago and everyone still calls it by the old name Rua Gago Coutinho. In fact, Placida wrote down the address for us she wrote “ex-Rua Gago Coutinho,” which reminds me of “Old 33” in Fort Wayne, and cab drivers totally know what we’re talking about when we say ex-rua Gago Coutinho. Overall moving into this place has improved our moods quite a bit as the last place was ok, but it was really tiny and the road that it was on was really dirty and noisy.