The apartment that we rent in Kormangala is smaller than the one in Suresnes. The tiled bathroom is the shower stall. I could bathe myself while sitting on the toilet. I use buckets of water to fill up the electric washing machine, instead of a boxspring, the mattress is suspended on a wooden board and there is no dining table or sofa, just a small low table and a long, wide cushion on the floor. Sometimes the power goes off during the day. Despite these mild affronts to comfort, the most tiresome inconvenience is the weak, often non-existent internet connection.
The problem wasn’t remedied today when the technician stopped by to install a wire to connect the router in the apartment downstairs (an apartment scarcely larger than ours though occupied by 5 Dutch people) to our internet repeater upstairs. All the technician did was string a black wire from downstairs, up to our place, winding it around a column and threading it through the paneless kitchen window where a ventilation fan was installed but not connected to anything. He was scared to enter the apartment occupied by the terrifying (my words) foreign woman (his words and a clever colloquialism for white lady). Evidently, he didn’t believe it necessary to test the connection in my presence. Believe it or not, the Internet still doesn’t work and I have yards of black cord draped down into my dish rack! I look forward to seeing him tomorrow when he has to re-do his work properly.