So not kidding about the cockroaches, although I really wish I was.

Oh people.

I wanted to write this really excited, peppy post about my new apartment and how I was all moved in and yeay! – I really really did, I even had it all planned out in my head, and the title of post was going to be some silly mutation of a line from the Wizard of Line or that “Home on the Range” song or something (I was coming up with new ones almost daily, and let me tell you, you are sorry you’ll never get to see them, because they were great, seriously), but then…well then real life interceded.

The truth is that I’m in a not-so-good place here right now – nothing is working out well yet, and I think I had been relying on the move to transfer at least one category over into the good. Instead, as I should have expected, the move just took up a ton of time and energy and presented a whole new array of sparkling problems for me to deal with. I moved last Friday, and spent the whole weekend scrubbing every surface and killing more spiders and other creepy crawlies than you can imagine. On Monday my roommate’s boyfriend uncovered definite evidence that there were at least at one point, a serious community of rats living in the apartment and killed a number of the largest cockroaches I have ever seen. I’m talking only slightly smaller than a Maryland blue crab. No, no, really. Uh huh. And then we started noticing problems with the electricity.

It’s been raining a lot here over the past week, and Santo Domingo’s electric infrastructure is less than ideal under ideal conditions, so in a nutshell, I’ve spent the last two days waiting in the dark for the electrician and then trying to explain, in Spanish, concepts that I don’t really understand in English. (Our electrical problems seem to a generator problem, but the electricity which goes out for short periods regularly, went out in my neighborhood on Tuesday night at 8pm and just finally kicked back on about 20 minutes ago, Wednesday night at 11ish, and I could hear people outside in the street yelling “The light! The light!”)

It’s been kind of a trying time.

The good news is that the apartment is at least mostly clean, I am crossing my fingers that the electric problems are over, the leak in my bedroom is fixed, and the numbers of the spider population seem to be dwindling. Plus, I didn’t have to personally face any cockroaches, although I did have to see a couple that promise to haunt me, and I really think I can go ahead and put that in the “doing good in the DR” category. And I think I’m going to have people over tonight to watch Grey’s Anatomy (that’s right – the cable that comes included with my new apartment has the American ABC channel), so I think we’re close to moving the “Housing” item from the bad to the good category. And then, I promise, I’ll post that cheery post with the list of all the things I love about this place and some sort of visual information (I’m thinking about video, but I may be too technically challenged for that, we’ll see) so you all can what it looks like where I live.