New Roommates?...

Kind of irrelevant to the educational perspective of the trip but I feel it is an interesting story nonetheless. Yesterday, Monday July 5, Andrew and I were off on an innocent trip to the grocery store to replenish our supplies of Coca-Cola and sweet tea after a long day on the town. To our surprise there was a rather hairy Serbian gentleman standing in our hallway when we arrived back at our apartment. Its no surprise that we were a little shocked and were preparing for the worst. However, he quickly smiled and introduced himself as our new roommate. Still a little shocked but not wanting to be rude, we welcomed him and exchanged some awkward conversation before he left to explore the town. Now since we were leaving in two days, I did not want to press the issue so I simply decided to sacrifice my room and sleep in the living room. Nothing against Alexander (the Serbian house guest), but I'm not completely familiar with European customs nor am I completely comfortable sharing a bed with a complete stranger so the living room was my best bet.

Shortly after Alexander's departure, however, we had a second visitor. This time it was a young man from what we are assuming was Slovenia but weren't entirely certain because of his accent. This is when we realized something was wrong. We had come to accept Alexander and were almost looking forward to hanging out with him but now we were out of beds. So I promptly marched downstairs and visited the apartment office to clear up this little fiasco. When I first informed management of our house guests, they kind of laughed saying that it was not possible. After convincing them that I was tell them the truth and not simply tripping out on hallucinogens, they proceeded to call the local school and see what was going on. Turns out, the school and the apartment had mixed up some paper work and double booked our apartment. It was a quick fix as they just gave them another apartment across the street. The situation was not completely resolved, however, as I had to somehow explain to the second guest, who spoke no english, that there was a mix up and that we were not simply kicking him out.

So instead of risking a conflict, I took Fabio (I called him this because I never really caught his name) to the office so they could deal with it. On the way I decided to try and converse with him in what I have come to find to be the international language. Futbol. So I begin simply saying the names of teams in the World Cup and tried to gauge his reaction. If he laughed, I laughed, if he scowled, I scowled. Luckily this lasted long enough to reach the office. Once there, management explained to him the issue and the problem was solved. The two new roommates moved out and we continued our night as usual.