A Flooded Apartment in Costa Rica
I woke to my own paddling pool.
“The Hole,” is what I called it.
And it was a hole! To call it an apartment was a bit of a stretch, but I guess that’s what you get from living in the ghetto. It was all I could afford from my pitiful part-time wage teaching English at one of the worst language schools in San José, Costa Rica.
It was a room. A small room with flimsy plasterboard cordoning off a small rectangular bathroom in the corner. It was absolutely filthy, had no stove or cooking apparatus of any kind, an outdoor sink installed as an indoor one, and barely enough room to fit much of anything.
The highlight of the “apartment” was the small gap at the top of the walls that allowed you to hear and smell everything that went on in the neighbouring apartments. For example, the woman that lived to the left of me got up every morning at 4am to cook breakfast, sometimes turning on what I can only assume was a washing machine — God knows where she put it!
Despite trying to dress it up as much as I could by adding splashes of colour, my additions were relatively futile in making me feel okay about living there.
Let’s set the scene
Costa Rica has two seasons; the wet season and the dry season. In the wet season, it rains every…
