It's Not Always Good to Know the Details

A relationship with an apartment can be similar to a romantic relationship with a person. At first it's all goo-goo ga-ga, it's perfect, so lovely and beautiful, the view is amazing, its great to have a table to eat on, several chairs to choose from in which to sit, nothing is wrong with it. You may even feel that you aren't good enough for the place, that somehow you don't deserve it. It's a honeymoon, but soon the smell of sewage, the breeze that flows through even when all the windows and doors are shut, the puddle that forms under the bed when it rains hard, the car that was stolen from the parking lot, the police that came one night when a boyfriend of a tenant was accused of stealing cellphones, the guy down the street in jail for steeling carparts, and now the woman that was murdered next door this week, the one-sided perception ends and you are left with the stark reality that it isn't all positive, there are negatives too. That just like a person in a romantic relationship (any relationship really) there is two sides to this apartment and where it stands.

Becoming chatty with the manager of the building has drawbacks too. We love gossip, but sometimes knowing the gossip doesn't actually have any benefits. We would have found out about the murder anyway since it's in the paper, but not all the other little tidbits that come with managing a building for 11 years.

Like, how several years ago there was a group of Nigerians living in a flat running a drug scheme, or the 11 year old girl that hung out with them until a social worker came for her, or the group of 5 Asian girls living in a flat meant for 2. Or, that over the weekend when the gate wasn't working someone's car was stolen over night. Most buildings in South African cities have gates or walls around them. Our building has gates and a partial wall that allows people to hop over it. Jared and I have often wondered about this and make sure to keep the door locked all the time. The building is old and so is the gate so when it stopped working last week, it was left open over night by someone who couldn't be bothered to manually close it after they drove through. Sucks for the person who woke up to find their locked car gone.

And the murder. The building next to us is a holiday lodge/backpackers. We look down onto their backyard of sorts from our balcony. It's not usually very busy, though in the summer more people came through. Apparently there has been a women working there with her boyfriend for the past 10 months and on Monday it looks like he strangled her during a fight. He claimed she hung herself with a scarf in the bathroom, but when the police arrived she was on the bed and so far he looks pretty guilty so he's been arrested. We don't remember seeing her as our spying was into the back part of the place and the reception is in the front, but it's really sad. She was in her 30s and has, I guess, had, a child. The owner of the lodge is worried about the bad press since people don't generally want to stay somewhere a murder occurred. So bad press for the lodge, a family one member short, and a guy in jail. The paper said her parents drove 20 hours to Cape Town not knowing if it was in fact their daughter that was dead until they identified the body. Horrible.

South Africa unfortunately has a high murder rate...even though several years ago apparently the then president Thabo Mbeki said that South Africa doesn't have a problem with crime, but a perception problem of crime. One of the incredibly dumb things he said.

As of now, we still like our apartment and it's location but definitely have a more balanced view of it after 5 months of living in it.