house!

We found a house! It was magical. Someone from the Fulbright office offered to help us, and this is what happened: She looked at the same newspaper that we looked at the day before, started making phone calls, took us to see three places, and negotiated a price for us on one of them. All in like 3 hours! We’re going over again tomorrow to sign the lease and to do a more thorough check of electricity, water, etc. But mostly it’s a huge weight off of my chest to have found a place at all – now that I have that settled (though we probably won’t move in until next week), I can start thinking about maybe getting started on my project. Maybe.

I think the place is going to be great, though! It’s super central, and on a main road, but off on a little lane with 7 or 8 other houses, so hopefully it won’t be too loud. Also, did I mention it’s a house? There are three of us, and this place has 2 floors and 4 bedrooms, with about 2 sitting areas on each floor. We have a guest bedroom (great for visitors, hint, hint!). I think the amount of space will be really great, though, because it means that we can stay out of each other’s hair, when we’re working or having friends over or whatever. Mostly, though, it just feels sooooo much more pleasant than the super modern places that we looked at yesterday. We saw two apartments for about the same price that had been built for air conditioning, which we don’t plan on using, but which means that the ceilings are low and that air flow is bad. Much better to have a place that was built for the heat.

The other exciting thing that we did today was to go watch the Grapes of Wrath (movie) at the American Center – they show free movies once a week apparently. I’ve never seen this movie, but I think we saw a play of it once on a field trip in junior high? Anyway, the movie made me feel very American somehow, all the dust and the accents and the good hard-working folks, I guess. It’s something that I’m adding to my list of evidence for my new theory - that manifest destiny has been much more important to the development of the American psyche than I ever thought before. The other piece of evidence on my list is the pictures on the pages of the new American passports, which are mostly natural, and have a bunch of pictures of the West – one of a steam engine, etc. If anyone has anything to add to the list (or some actual knowledge about any of this), please let me know.

However, there was one moment in the movie that really did resonate kind of creepily with today, to be honest. The bad guys were coming with bulldozers to take over the sharecroppers land and were telling them they have to get out. One of the farmers was arguing with him, and asked who was to blame. The dude in the big fancy car said it was no use blaming him, he was just answering to the repossesers or whatever. But they were just answering to the bank in Omaha, but that manager was answering to the big bosses, who were answering to folks oout east. The response of the farmer was, "But who do we shoot?" gfc, anyone?