Our Apartment

We live right in the Centro of Joinville, the downtown area in a tall apartment complex.  We are on the tenth floor and we have three bedrooms and three bathrooms, a kitchen with a breakfast bar area and a separate dining area, a living/family room and a laundry room with a decent size storage room off the laundry room.  We also have a little balcony. 

Here's our view of the city from our balcony

There's a net covering the entire outer edges of the balcony.  I like it--tI put an extra clothesline out there and it's nice to know my clothes won't fall away.  Plus, Jason likes to kick a soccer ball around out there and we know it won't fall!

We have one parking space in the parking lot under the building.  The building is gated and has guard/door person at the gate at all times.  If someone comes to visit, the door person calls us to get permission to let them up.  We learned from Papai's co-worker that in Sao Paulo, at least, apartments are hot commodities (over houses) because of the safety and security of these gates and guards.  It probably doesn't really matter for us since Joinville is pretty safe overall but it's still nice.

The front and back of our building

Walking into the building there's a nice entry way all decorated for Christmas.  Past that are the two elevators.  Yes, they work! (Someone asked me).  You have to actually open a door to get to them and then the elevator door slides open. But on this level there is also a game with a pool table, a newly renovated party room with lots of tables, a kitchen bar, and churrascurias (built in indoor BBQs).  Past that and outside there's a pool, a basketball court with soccer goals on either end and tucked into a back corner in the opposite direction from the soccer/basketball court (quintal is what they call it here) there's a playground. We've seen quite a few playgrounds here and they all look very similar--made of painted metal and painted wood, they have teeter-totters, merry-go-rounds, swings, and slides and another type of swing that I keep calling a see-saw (except, I think a see-saw is the same thing as a teeter-totter, right?).  My kids love the playground.



My kitchen has a window into the laundry room area.  There's a bathroom to the right of the laundry area and the storage room is to the left in the laundry room.   I just found out today that I DO have hot running water in the kitchen sink if I turn on the "hot" knob and wait long enough.  I never did have hot water in the kitchen sink on my mission and we've been to several houses here that don't have it at all.  I've been boiling water to wash dishes when I cook with meat.  The rest I just figured, oh, well!  I survived my mission without it.  Plus, my sister who went into public health told me once that studies have shown that unless the water is scalding hot, it doesn't really make a difference to the cleanliness of the dishes whether it's hot or cold water.   But now I don't have to worry one way or another because I DO have hot water!  My oven/stove are electric gas (I mean, I don't have to light a match to start it up).  We don't drink water from the tap.  There is a filter but it looks really old.  My mission companion said the water is safe to drink but Dan's co-worker said it isn't so we're playing it safe.  We were buying mineral water (without carbonation-because you have to differentiate here) in 6 pacs of 1.5 L bottles but that was about 12 reais per pack-almost a dollar per bottle.  Now we buy 20L bottles and we have a little tabletop water dispenser.  We had to actually buy the bottle (20 reais) and then buy the water 5-10 reais depending on the brand.  Now that we bought the first bottle, we just return the empty one and get a full one in exchange and just pay for the water.  This has been helpful for emergency preparedness.  With a family of four we go through 20L every 3-4 days, using it just to drink and cook with, and we're probably not drinking how much we should for how hot and humid it is.

Panorama of the kitchen/breakfast bar area.  The brown door goes out to the area with the elevators.

Here's the laundry room looking through the kitchen window.  The plumber came the first week we were here and it turns out the owner of our apartment/condo accidentally screwed a screw right into the pipe.  So the plumber had to take out the tile, break the wall and fix it.  Our pipes are just plastic and the whole building is brick.

There are several things I love about the apartment and one of them is the closet space!  I've never seen a closet built into the room the way we have them in the States.  Instead, they have closets like the ones in our pictures.  We have tons of shelves, rods to hold shirts, pull out sock drawers, and pull out pants hangers.  Katelyn's room and Jason's room both have similar closets, plus they have desks, which they love so they don't have to play with their toys on the floor.  It's fabulous!  The other thing I love about our room is that we have a light switch at the door but also right above our pillows so we can turn out the light while in bed.  Awesome!  Each room has a ceiling fan but ours doesn't work right now.  After a couple of miserably hot nights this past week, we are buying a portable fan.

The bathrooms are very European.  Mostly I say that because each one has a bidet.  It's not a full toilet bidet--instead it's a sprayer with two knobs to control the water temperature.  I think you just stretch the sprayer over to the toilet to use it.  I have not tried it and probably won't, although now that we've been here three weeks I am beginning to understand why someone might want to "freshen up" that area since it is just so hot and humid.  Other cool things about our bathroom--the counters are high.  Great for us, a pain for the kids.  They have to use a chair to reach the sinks.  The bathroom cabinets have a huge pull out drawer to put your laundry in, and two cupboard/drawer things under the sink.  The kitchen is the same under the sink.  I love it.  Finally, we have have a glass shelf under the mirror about 6 inches off the counter that runs the entire length of the bathroom counter.  I can put all my makeup and stuff on it and still wipe down the sink every day.  I love it!

The shower has an electric shower head plugged right into the wall.  The one in our bathroom isn't working great-it gets burning hot really fast and despite all our attempts to adjust the temperature it doesn't work.  I like to joke that everything's the opposite here.  People use up all the cold water so we're stuck with the hot!  But really, the electric shower head probably just needs some adjusting.

Here's our family/living room (sala de estar in Portuguese)

The apartment was supposed to come furnished.  It came with all the furniture you see in the above picture and a dining room table and chairs and one bed.  Luckily, it was a queen size bed so the first week two of us slept on the bed and two of us slept on the couch, until we were able to buy the bed for Papai and me.  Safari Girl has been sleeping on a mattress that Papai's co-working Rodrigo loaned us and this week we're getting a frame because she doesn't want to sleep on the floor anymore.

Decorated for Christmas.  I brought the advent calendars and the stockings.  We bought the TV here.  The kids toys all fit in two drawers behind the bottom cupboard on the right.  It's awesome!!

I'll update this a little later with some more pictures of our place.