Insight # 93 The More The Merrier!

Until someone stops buying toilet paper.

As a student you usually fall in the category “people with a limited budget” when it comes to your financial status. At least that is my category. Even though I’m a very lucky girl and have parents I can always rely on in case I’m in a tight spot moneywise and even though they got rid of student fees here in Austria and I have some more money on my hand that otherwise would have been invested in silly projects like fully functional computers or well-stocked libraries at universities, I still live in a city where dorm rooms are scarce and apartments are usually very expensive. For libertarian yet social people like me, there was only one satisfactory way to solve this problem: a shared apartment.

My significant other from the land down under, where women glow and men plunder (so who’s sick of my song references yet?) and I had shared a place before when we were living in Spain and were used to all kinds of roomie shenanigans so we decided to also give it a go in Salzburg. We were lucky and after only a month of constantly looking at apartments and speaking to the strangest people we found a really nice shared flat not far from the old city center that had a huge room for rent and where they were happy to have a couple living there.

After about five hours there I had mutated into the apartment mom. This always happens to me. I pretend not to like it, but that’s a big fat lie. We had moved in with two boys and a girl that was hardly ever there and, frankly, you could tell that it was a place where boys lived. I spent the first few days cleaning, not our room, but the kitchen and bathroom which were practically alive and crawling. It was like nature was slowly reclaiming the space our apartment had been built on – from inside trash cans and drains. I love animals and am generally an advocate of the whole “live and let live” thing but that first week I had to go on a killing spree. After I had poisoned, drowned, chopped in half or skewered a majority of the unwanted fauna in that house I began to feel very much at home.

Life in a shared apartment can be good, everyone who has nice housemates will agree. And so far all of our housemates have been wonderful, albeit somewhat eccentric, but hey who isn’t? The first year or so we shared the place with P, an Italian bear of a guy who loved to play extraterrestrial-esque music on his two synthesizers, J, a German psychology student who lost his house key three times which always sent P into fits of rage because he was worried about his alien music machines getting stolen, and M, an Austrian accordion student at the University Mozarteum in Salzburg and great yodeler, too. Nothing beats enjoying your morning coffee to the sound of cross-mountain communication systems from the other end of the hallway. When P and J moved out we found lovely replacements in A and A aka Ginge. (I know it’s confusing. Shh, just keep reading.)

Ginge, whose nickname is meant in an affectionate way, was a German-English guy whose daily Tetley intake was worrisome even for an Englishman. A was yet another German psychology student, a strict vegetarian herself but tolerant towards all us omnivores in the house, particularly towards the guys as Ginge and Crocodile Dundee enjoyed ordering insane amounts of pork dishes from the Chinese restaurant on Sundays to devour them shamelessly in front of A and the three tomatoes and one carrot she usually had for dinner.

When A and A moved out, P, a medical student from Bavaria and Austrian receptionist D moved in and for the first time there was only one boy left in the flat. That didn’t really change the non-existent cleaning schedules, because – I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m stressing the cliché here – it wasn’t like the men of the house were ever doing any of the work anyway. (In fact Ginge was barely capable of washing his own clothes; we had to sticky-tape step-by-step instructions to the washing machine.)

Living together like this, “like hippies”, as my loving grandmother would say, has many advantages for students. First and foremost it’s cheaper than many of the other you have. Secondly you can help each other out. After all most of us are still scared sort-of-grownups being weaned from living at home and having omniscient parents or guardians figure life out for us. I feel this way at least. (Or was I just really sheltered as a kid?) It’s always nice to have some people around you to help bear the burden of confusing bills and IKEA construction manuals and rental agreements. And thirdly you can do lots of things together like party or cook or even study. We were never much of an “eating and shopping together” kind of shared apartment, that I think gets too complicated. We share fridges and take each other’s eggs and milk if the need arises, but we don’t ever shop together.

It’s not all sunshine, lollipops and rainbows, though. Because sometimes the unimaginable happens. Sometimes roomies have all their yodeling friends over for a big yodeling party in the kitchen and you’ve got work the next morning. Sometimes roomies eat all your Granny Smith apples thinking they are theirs. Sometimes roomies use all the hot water. Sometimes roomies leave the stove on over night. Sometimes roomies don’t buy toilet paper when it’s their turn. (By the way, there is a culprit in our midst at the moment, who I don’t think has bought a roll of toilet paper – or emptied the dishwasher, for that matter – ever in their entire life. Not mentioning any names here.) Then what do you do?

Our apartment has always “worked” without a single written down schedule. People clean the common areas of the house, the toilet, bathroom, hall and kitchen, when they think it’s appropriate, some clean more, some clean less, the guys don’t clean at all, but us ladies have learned that it costs so much more energy to constantly get angry at them than to just do it ourselves. People buy more toilet paper or more salt or more detergent (all of which are things we share) when it’s their turn. Just sometimes you get the odd forgetful roomie. (About the toilet paper thing, I have considered hoarding my favorite pink, quality toilet paper in our room. But that would also target the non-TP-sinners who do buy it when it’s their turn …)

It’s all a question of diplomacy, that’s how anything can be solved, whether in a relationship, at school, at work or in a shared apartment. And that, dear reader, was my last insight for now and I very much hope you liked what you read. Have a wonderful summer!