Betsy's Habitat in Finland

Picture it, Tapiontie 9 B 12 . . . Having a hard time? Never been there? Well, I know it has been a long time coming, but I am going to give you all the world star tour of Tapiontie 9 B 12, inhabited by Eva, Czech Republic, Betsy, USA, Delphine, France, and Annie, Isle de Reunion (French). These first pictures that I present to you are the before shots of our apartment. At the closing of my journey here in Finland, I will take another set of pictures to show you all how the flat has changed and accumulated the things that make our flat feel more at home.

Here I show you the precious key to my building and my front door. If I were to lose this key I would have pay 120 euros to get it replaced!

TERVETULOA to my building (or at least the front door) . . .

There are 3 sections of Tapiontie 9: A, B, and C. There are corridors connecting A to B and B to C. In building A is Sauna 1 (the one that works). In the corridor between A and B there is Sauna 2 (which does not work). The laundry room with two washers (not very big), one VERY large dryer, and two VERY large drying rooms is in the corridor between B and C.

9 B 12’s front door. . .

Here you being your first journey through my humble abode . . . (note that the door has no handle, has a peep hole, a door bell, and a mail slot).

Other side of the door . . .

I found it quite interesting that there was no handle on the outside of the door. At least there is one on the inside. Maybe that makes things safer? I dunno.

(oh, and this is completely off topic, but back in sophomore English I didn’t exactly try to hard to remember certain rules of English, so maybe one of you all will inform me of the rules with more and most and –er and–est. Such as I wrote above, am I correct in saying safer, or is it more safe? Also, as another side tangent, if there are grammatical mistakes, misspellings and such, don’t get too annoyed with me; I do try to proofread).

The second door after the first door . . .

I think this door is supposed to cut down on the amount of noise that sometimes comes in through the stairwell. Are you catching on with a theme here? . . . White, white, and more white.

Since I am on a door theme, here is another one . . .

And door number FOUR leads to . . . zee bazsroom.

Typical sink and mirror scene . . .

Yes, one of the lights is out, and they keep on going out! Rather irritating. I feel like I am back in my apartment Building J 339 A. Every couple weeks one of the light bulbs goes out. Grrr. Stupid light bulbs! ;) Maybe it is a sign. The Finnish people who make up the plans for bathrooms aren’t very bright (you will see what I mean in the below picture).

Do you notice anything a little different?

Well for one thing, the previous tenants don’t know how to clean a bathroom! Yucky! Well at least we got away from the purely white theme: pinks and rusty colors! Woo whooo!
;) Anyhow do you notice something a little weird about this picture? Yeah, there is no partition between the shower and the toilet! All I know is that if this were the case in Samantha’s old bathroom in Building B 339, her feet would smell like urine. Thankfully none of ours do, and Annie, the cleaning machine, scrubbed that floor like there was no tomorrow! She did a good job too (but you’ll see an after shot in a few months).

Here is a close up of the toilet . . .

I encountered my first Finnish toilet in the Helsinki airport. It took me about a minute to realize that the object on top of the toilet was the flusher.

Now for the bedrooms . . .

This is the bigger bedroom where the French girls stay. Needless to say, but it doesn’t look like this anymore. You can’t see but to the right of the picture are the closets. I didn’t feel like taking any other angles.

The other bedroom . . . (at 2 angles)

This is the smaller of the two rooms. Eva sleeps on the bottom, and I sleep on the top. This is the first night I was in my flat. Messy already! Haha!

Here is our closet . . .

Quite small, I know. I find it rather amazing thatboth of us are able to fit all of our clothes in this one closet. Real women we are!

First angle of our wonderful kitchen . . .

Not much to it, but the white theme is still going on. The bag is from Valintatalo. You have to pay for the plastic bags here! An atrocity, I know. The bags are anywhere between .13 and .17 cents per bag.

Angle number two . . .

Again more and more white!

Our dishes and stuff . . . I have to do quite a bit of converting . . .

Thankfully, the previous tenants (students) left us tons of silverware, cups, mugs, cooking utensils, cooking ware, etc. We had to buy a couple of things, but for the most part not much :) Notice the oven has degrees Celsius. I also have to convert cups, tablespoons, etc. into milliliters, deciliters, etc. I guess learning math did pay off ;)

Our humble living room . . .

When I first arrived, I thought we might have 6 girls living in one flat. I also thought that it would be disastrous! One bathroom for 6 girls, no way Jose!

Well, that’s all folks (for now). I’ll post some of the pics around the outside of our flat as well another day :)