Inspired by McNutcase's recent comments about his flatmates, and the subsequent posting of a link to a thread about this on b3ta, I thought it might be interesting to see what experiences UFies have made with the people they share their living space with (hmm, I suppose that would include SOs and family).
My flatmates in Uni accommodation are relatively sane and we get along peacefully, so I haven't really got anything to add to this. Though I suppose I could talk about two very temporary roommates on my school trip to Prague three years ago. It was a four-bed room, occupied by me & my best friend (both of us German), Laurent (French-Dutch guy) and Serguei (Russian). Now both of those were nice enough on their own, but they simply couldn't share a room. They were constantly arguing about *anything* they could think of, to the point where Serguei would sometimes sleep in a chair in the corridor. That was one thing. The other was that Serguei is absolutely nuts, to put it mildly. One of the minor annoyances was that he was very hard to shut up at night, as he constantly wanted to talk about girls and sex (nothing unusual for teenage guys, of course - but he was the only one of us that did, and we didn't want him to). In the morning, he got up first, and occupied the shower until we had to go down for breakfast; even if he got out early enough, the warm water reservoir would be empty and take a while to recover. Still not unusual. Where it gets interesting is that early on, he bought a woolly hat that covered all of his face except for the eyes, making him look rather dangerous (big, heavy bloke anyway) - possibly not a good idea for a Russian in Prague...? Amazingly, nothing happened. A few days in, he bought a Xylophone. Huge bloody thing. "It was a bargain, two octaves for only $PRICE!" He started playing it in the room. He'd never played one before, and to his credit, he managed pretty well. Laurent was immediately shouting at him to stop, of course; but after a few days of constant playing, Gregor and I were getting a little irritated as well. He had his clothes in a huge pile at the end of his bed; once, Gregor had bought a new CD and wanted to listen to it. He knew Serguei had borrowed a Discman from someone, and started digging through the pile. He didn't find the Discman, but he did find a porno mag or two. Serguei also bought several bottles of some Russian herb liqueur, for his family, because apparently it's hard to get further west, or much more expensive. I must admit to being slightly amused when one bottle broke inside his suitcase...
There's more about him, both from that trip and back in school. He's quite a nice guy, but very weird and often quite scary. One of the highlights (still in Prague) was when he told me and Gregor (both Germans!) that he didn't like Germans because of what they did to the Jews in WW2 (but he'd make an exception for us because we were such nice guys). A few minutes later, he was telling us all about this terrible Jewish conspiracy that controls the US. Er, right. |
