New apartment

EDIT: I forgot to mention, the bedroom has both a keylock and a hook lock (the kind where there's a loop on the doorframe and a hook on the door). We didn't check to see if the bathroom has a lock or not, but the front door has a peephole. I'm not sure if it showed up in the photos, but there's a wallphone right next to the front door in-between there and the bathroom.

EDIT x2: She just called us and said we can move in the foldout/sleeping couch, and she'll move out one of the beds.

I'm moving out of the student apartments and into an apartment near the main shopping street. The room is a little bigger than the room I have now, and it comes furnished. Everything is included in the rent, even internet (which isn't wireless). It's a "shared apartment", there are two other "rooms" besides ours - one hosts two Polish guys who've been living there a while already. The kitchen and bathroom is shared. The rooms are further apart from each other than ours and our flatmate's right now.

The rooms are in better condition, it seems fairly soundproof to the traffic noise, we have our own fridge and television (the fridge is about the same size as the fridge we share with our flatmate now). The freezer is shared and is in the kitchen. There's a washer and dryer in the laundry room, and the landlady pays for and brings the laundry detergent to the bathroom. The rooms are meant for two people to live in them anyway. The room is non-smoking.

The landlady is around sixty-five years old, I think. She's Icelandic, she has a son who lives in China right now. She studied abroad in England when she was younger. She doesn't rent to Icelanders because every time she's rented to them, they've messed up the room and been too noisy and stuff, when all the foreigners she's rented to have been just fine. She has cancer and can't work, so she gets her income from renting out the rooms. She says it's the most fun she's ever had. She's talkative and really nice. Rent is 45.000isk ($396.86 US as of now) per month and rent is paid one month in advance, so the first month we pay twice that.

Here's the outside of our apartment, from the street.

Here's the stairway. We're on the top floor. On each floor and as you go up the stairs, there's random artwork on the walls. The windows on the staircase are clouded over so you can't see through them though.

This is the entryway after you go inside. It's what you see once you go in the door, close it, and are looking from our bedroom to that spot.

Another photo of the entryway. To the left you can see the bathroom and to the right is our room with the door open. By the way, the apartment is probably around thirty minutes walking from the apartment we have now, I haven't timed it yet.

Inside the bathroom. The medicine cabinet has something that looks like little window shutters on each side.

Our room. There's a tv, four tables (two glass, one wood, one the tv sits on), two beds (one with a blanket over it), a dresser, a closet with shelves on the right and a spot for hanging on the left, three chairs plus one office chair, two heaters and two windows. There's also two sets of coat hooks, one by the door and one on one side of the closet. On the walls in various places there are hooks for hanging stuff.

We asked if we could move some of our furniture into the apartment but she didn't want us to, and on second thought it would be really hard to get it in the door and up all those stairs anyway. She said we could switch the blinds out with the curtains we have and we can put stuff on the wall, it's just the furniture she didn't want us to change. She said "The way I see it, you're the ones living here so you're going to have to live with whatever you do to the room, not me."

Here's the kitchen. The cupboards are stocked with pots and pans, dishware, and other things that I can't remember right now. We also have enough room to put anything they don't have in the kitchen that we already own, in our room.

The left side of the kitchen.

The right side.

The clock and shelf on the wall.

The view outside our right-most window, to the left.

View to the right.

Next time we go, I'll take photos of the side of our bedroom that we forgot about, and also the front door from the stairway.

We found the ad by looking at this page, which is an online version of the rent ads that are in the newspaper by the same name. She had posted the ad in English, probably because she said she doesn't want to rent to Icelanders.

Aside from the apartment being at the end of the main shopping street downtown, it's also right next to a bus station, two second-hand shops, the "Foss Hotel", and "11-11" grocery store. These are all within two blocks of the apartment.

As for the school, a couple weeks ago they sent an Email to everyone asking them to fill out the attached form and either Email it back to them, or hand a printed version to the office, by the fifteenth of this month. The form asked if you were renewing your rent contract for another year, and if not, where you were going to be staying in summer. It also said if you're not going to be staying another year, to go online to the student housing website and sign in, making sure you say there that you're moving out as well. When I asked at the school, they said you're supposed to give at the least one month's notice, and at most three month's notice. After that it just depends on how fast they can find someone to move into your flat. I couldn't remember my username or password for that site so I'm going to the office on Monday to ask about it. The office for student housing is on the upper floor of one of the school buildings, next to the counseling/student services center.

I updated the photo album with around eighty photos before I wrote this post, so you can see them here.

Christmas, New Year's

Over Christmas Jox from Sweden came over, and we did a lot of walking around and visited different shops. We didn't go outside of the capital area because Jox didn't care about seeing touristy places. On the 23rd is when we went down Laugarvegur, the main shopping street of the downtown area, and the shops were open late. There were carolers holding candles, (I think?) the Red Cross giving out free hot chocolate, a few booths selling cotton candy and sugar-roasted almonds... I bought a small bag of the almonds for something like 500kr (which is a bit expensive if you ask me, but I was in the Christmas spirit at the time).

There were at least three spots where various people were singing into microphones or music was playing just on this one street, too. On the Youtube account there's videos of at least some of the things I'm talking about.

On the 24th of December, at least in my group of friends, the Icelanders go around delivering gifts to their friends for the day. Roxy and Snorri came by to deliver presents to me, then left shortly after to do the same to the rest of their friends. Jox and I just stayed at home if I remember, because one of us was sick.

On the 25th we went to Snorri's house for a dinner with his family. After that Jox and I walked around outside in the snow for a bit, looking at the Christmas lights on the houses.

For New Year's we went to Snorri's house for a dinner with his family again, and then everyone sat down to watch the annual New Year's comedy show which parodies all the Icelandic events that happened over the year. Some of it's political and some of it is "cultural", like the fact that one music video got really popular and was used to draw in tourists.

First I was sick for part of Jox's stay, and then Jox got sick after I recovered. So we didn't do a lot. But Jox just bought a plane ticket to come back on February 13th, to try and get a job here.

After Jox left I haven't been doing much, it's just school. Today I went to the fabric store to buy fabric and ribbons to make something like this, a Nordic flag garland. It seems popular to put bunting on Christmas trees with the flags of the country you're in here, and it used to be that you could find paper flag garlands with all the Nordic flags together on one string, but now you can only find them with a single flag (so, a pack with only Icelandic flags or only Danish).

I was thinking of getting a job in the summer, most likely working at a kindergarten because you don't have to have any qualifications except passable Icelandic for that. The first and second semester of school will probably be the hardest too. I heard that here, they make the first years of a major harder to try and weed out the people who aren't actually that interested. I don't know how true that is though.

Sorry that I haven't been sending many postcards, but I'll try to remember. I haven't been doing anything so it feels like I don't have anything to write about.