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.

Airport and first days

Getting from America to Iceland was no problem, and when going through Iceland's customs they literally asked me a single question, which was "Are you staying in Iceland?". i wanted to buy stuff at the duty free but I had too much luggage to have been able to carry it.

Snorri's mom picked me up at the airport because he was working, and she didn't have work because she was on summer holiday. When we got home Aino was awake, so after breakfast we went to run some errands.

Eventually I registered myself with the government, got my apartment keys from the school (I'm in student housing), and found my apartment. The flat was disgusting. There were newspapers piled up from months ago, the kitchen window couldn't close, the latch on the oven door had broke so the oven was unopenable, the freezer had frozen over, the bedroom heater couldn't turn on even halfway to maximum, there was volcanic ash from May covering the balcony, kitchen door, windowsill, and the kitchen shelves closest to that window...

It took four of us the first day and two the second to get the flat mostly cleaned. I submitted my list of complaints and just today they came in and fixed the windows so they can close now, but didn't fix anything else.

There's trash bins, a bicycle storage room, and laundry room downstairs in the complex. I'm in room 201 and it seems foreigners are paired with foreigners, Icelanders with Icelanders.

My flatmate is from Sri Lanka and is finishing her thesis paper for her Doctorate(?) in Fisheries. She's been here since January and she seems to be staying for at least another year. She knows zero Icelandic and her English isn't the best, she's 36 and is married. The only friend she sees is also from Sri Lanka and is studying the same subject as her. She doesn't like Icelandic food because it isn't spicy, she stays in her room all day and only goes out to buy groceries on the weekend.

My flatmate has no real kitchen supplies (baking dishes, measuring cups, tea kettle, cleaning supplies) so I had to buy all of that. I also had to get a desk, chair, bed, cutlery and dishes, curtains for the windows, et cetera. We seem to be the only flat without curtains in the kitchen, too. Snorri and his family drove them to my place and set them up for me.

The rent, according to my flatmate, will come for me as a slip in the mail around the 5th of each month and I'll have unil around the 20th to pay it. She's set up her bank account to pay it automatically so she doesn't get a slip. Rent is a base cost of around $350 and utilities are on top of that. The rent cost changes monthly from the index rate.

You can't put holes, glue, or paint on the walls. Those are basically the rules of the apartment complex. There are ridge-like things on top of the bedroom and entryway walls, so you can hook framed photos up that way without making holes.

Photos

Videos:
Tour of flat during cleaning
Volcanic ash on the balcony
Melting ice from the defrosting freezer with tap water
The laundry room downstairs