The African Inn

I am living in the African Inn, which is a large apartment building full of mostly foreign exchange students.

 There is a restaurant on the first floor of the building--I don't know if it is any good or not but apparently they do a lot of catering because you see a lot of "Meram" catering vans around.  The other picture above is a picture from the roof of the building (there are eight floors of apartments in this building so this is quite high).

I am on the 5th floor (6th floor American) and so have a pretty good view of a bunch of roof tops. There is a chestnut tree just outside, though, which is even taller than my window.

I am on Christiaan de Wetstraat and the back of the building looks out on the Afrikaanderplein, which is a large park area with playgrounds, bike parks, and lots of benches and things. It is very pretty.  They are filling the outside edges of the park with booths so I expect there should be a market or festival of some kind there sometime this week.  The cross street, which is about 50 feet north of my room, is "Paul Kreugerstraas."

I have a room, a kitchenette with two heating units and a refrigerator, and my own bathroom, which is pretty nifty, actually as a lot of the other apartments that Stadswonen has do not.

This is my apartment as you come in from the hall.  You can't really see it because of the light but the door is a really bright purple.

This is my room.  It is quite easy to be tidy when all you have is what fit in two and a half suitcases.





My kitchen is little-bitty and my bathroom is kind of industrial feeling but at least I don't have to share them with anyone and I have a place to cook for myself.  I think that I miss having a microwave way more than I miss having an oven.

 

There is a Bibliotheek (a library) at the end of the street too, which could be fun--they have English language books as well as Dutch language books and reading books in Dutch would probably be good for my language skills anyways--but it would cost €36 for a year's membership, so I will have to think about whether it is worth it or not--maybe I will just slip in and read the books there, in their comfy chairs, instead.

This is a very Muslim part of town as well as having a lot of immigrants.  Many of the shops have Arabic signage and you can hear people speaking Arabic when you walk through the streets.  I have been to one of the Arabic groceries because they had good looking oranges fairly cheap and because they also seem to stay open a lot later than the Dutch stores.  (It takes a little while to get used to everything closing by 6pm.)  It advertised itself as "100% Halal".  I hope that that is a lot closer to eating kosher dill pickles than to eating meat offered to idols.  They were really good oranges, though.