Walls

[alodnamra]

My next-door neighbour is just like another grandma to me. And so the rest of her family (her daughter = my aunt, her grandchildren = my cousins, and the feeling is reciprocal). As for the rest of my building, well... on the 1st floor, there's a bed & breakfast and an old lady who died last year and now the flat is not used, I guess her children will rent it soon. On the 2nd floor, one of the flats is switching tenants all the time, like every 2 months, and the other, there's another nice old lady who used to give us lots of sweets everytime we met her on the stairs. As for the 3rd floor, one is owned by the man who owns 3 of the other flats (the 1st floor ones and the 2nd floor switching one), who, by the way, only lives in it with his wife like 1 month out of each year, the rest of the time, they leave for Galicia... and when they're here, all they do is complain and demand things. And the other flat, I swear, I think it's been turned into a brothel. There used to be another old lady there, but now, there live 3 girls and their pimp. Really. Unknown men come and go all the time from it, making it all rather suspicious, but hey, the building is clean, they don't make any noise... I'm not complaining.

As you can see, I do know my neighbours...

[kuyan]

In our block of flats:

At the front of the largest building is an eighteen-or-nineteen-year-old man who is at uni and always busy, but who I've sometimes talked with about school (we get on fairly well), his middle-aged mother who tried, unsuccessfully, to help me learn Chinese, and a boarder who I don't know very well (I think they've turned the front room into a third bedroom). Recently I've collected their mail for them while they were in China, and the woman gave us some chinese dates. Until last year, the father also lived there, but the couple divorced early last year.

Above them is another chinese family, comprising a couple, both scientists, and their two young children (neither yet at school), who seem to take up most of the time their work doesn't. I am curious about their research, but normally when I'd like to ask I worry I'd be taking too much attention away from their kids (I have found out a bit about the one's research, but not very much).

The next flat back in the same building on the ground floor is owned by the Housing commission, inhabited by a muslim couple who normally seem to have relatives visiting, and who, on the one or two occasions I've visited them, got me to sit in their front room while they brought food or the boy I was taking a present to (last christmas we took presents to a lot of neighbours).

I don't know who, if anyone, lives above them.

Behind them, on the ground floor, is our flat. Above us is an old woman with many potplants, who sometimes asks small favours of us (for example, moving things too heavy for her to move herself) and who let me photograph in her house for part of an art project, who I have had little interaction with other than that.

Behind us on the ground floor and on the top floor are two people I know very little of, though one of them has also allowed me to take photos for aforementioned art project.

There are two smaller buildings very close to that one, very similar in appearance and layout, and with the upstairs units in them accessed by the same staircases and balcony-like-things as the upstairs flats on it. In the front one live some some fairly young people who I don't know very well. I think there was recently a visiting Frenchman staying with them, but that might have been the flat behind them. Last year, they replaced a group of young men who had got a bad reputation when one of them drove into several cars, all parked on a short dead-end street, consecutavely, while driving someone elses car, and who left soon afterwards.

I don't know who's above that flat. In the back building, accross from us, is a man who I sometimes hear complaining into the telephone (I assume it's into the telephone) when I'm outside. I can't make out words, but he sounds really upset, though not at whoever he's talking to. He and his girlfriend broke up last year, and after that he was briefly broke. He and my father have exchanged favours, and one time, at his request, I took a photo of him in a local park and emailed it to him so he could show it to a someone in England.

Above him is another couple I don't interact with much. To date our only interaction was my borrowing a gardening fork.

[the Gallipoli girl]

(070310 01:55 PM)French Frog Wrote:  I can't help it if you can't understand my reminiscent amount of WISDOM

Oh, so that's what they're calling it now? ^^



I don't know any of my new neighbours here, but back at home I knew everyone on our end of the street. It was funny, one end of the street was like "residential" and they all know each other, and then there's four houses including mine about 100m further down that are considered "bush", and we're all friends and look out for each other - plant-watering and pet-watching whilst on holidays, etc. I'd give a more in-depth description, but now is not the time and I'm afraid it'd be boring.