Gringo In Peru

Today we went to visit the apartment Vanessa and I should be living in, but its not in a livable condition.

The apartment is in Miraflores, an inner-ring suburb of Lima. Vanessa’s job is in La Molina, where we live. If we moved her drive would go from 5 minutes to at least 30-45 minutes, depending on traffic of course.

As I’ve written before Miraflores is the tourist hub of Lima. If you were to visit here on business or pleasure chances are your hotel would be in Miraflores. Its also the most urban of all the suburbs with the requisite tall buildings, traffic, busy sidewalks, cafes, etc.

One thing that’s nice about the area is its proximity to the ocean. I would guess the Pacific is about 1-2 miles from the apartment.

From what I’m told, nobody has lived in or been in the place regularly for at least 10 years. There is a calendar on the wall from 1990. Vanessa’s mom told me it was used by her step-dad and his friends as kind of a hang out for a few years, but thats about all.

The place is small. This observation is coming from a guy who recently moved out of a lovely 600 square foot apartment. When you walk in the door, there is a the galley-style kitchen is on your right and there is a space to put a table and chairs. The living/bedroom has enough room for a couch at one end and a bed at the other. Maybe a desk or TV stand too. You can separate the room in two by a folding curtain like you would find in a church basement.

Off the bedroom is a closet and bathroom.

In both the kitchen and bathroom, there is paint literally falling off the walls. The bathtub is full of paint chips. In the kitchen the burners on the stove are rusted out. There’s a small, larger than a dorm room fridge stocked with tonic water and mostly empty bottles of Gin and flavored vodkas. Some of the closet doors have fallen prey to termites. At one time there was navy blue carpeting covering the room. That’s now ripped off the floor (those are the piles in the pictures) and will soon be replaced with ceramic tiles. In fact, the whole place will be gutted.

The whole place will be remodeled and livable again although its not clear if Vanessa and I will be living there. Her step dad wants to rent it out. Despite its size, its location is key. In a perfect world he may get $4-500/month for it.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 6:39 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.