Pakoras, Germs, and Pipes

This week Michael and I went to Govinda's , a combination Indian buffet and movie theater. Although, it's not like a standard movie theater. It's the kind of movie theater a rich person has in their mansion. There are futon mattresses and pillows to lie on while you're in your vegetarian food coma. It was fun, but next time we will have to see a more lighthearted movie than Dallas Buyers' Club.

We've found an annoying aspect about the way the Australian rental real state works; I'm referring to how every different unit in a building is managed by a different property manager/realtor. The pipe that belongs to our upstairs neighbor that is slightly exposed coming out of and back into our bathroom ceiling now has a tiny leak in it. At our apartment back in Arlington, we would have put in a work order either online, in person, or by making a short call 24 hours a day. It would most likely be fixed the next day, no matter what day of the week we put our work order in. Here, because the pipe doesn't actually belong to us, it's technically our upstairs neighbor's plumbing, so I have to go upstairs and knock on their door and ask them to contact their company, who then contacts their own plumber to fix the problem. I'm not sure when it will be fixed since it's the weekend, and we will have to coordinate with our neighbors to find a time when we could have a plumber get into both their apartment and our apartment. We are lucky it's a small leak and not urgent, and we are lucky that our neighbors are home, nice, speak English, and receptive to doing something about it right away. If any of these one issues were different, the situation could easily be a big mess. Hopefully it will sort itself out soon, since I've done all I can for the time being. 

I can't think of any situation where this separate property manager for each units thing is actually beneficial during any aspect of renting. Australians, get your stuff together and change your system and everybody wins.

While I'm on a roll about one thing that needs to be changed, I might as well mention another. Working in childcare and education, I have seen my fair share of epidemics that sweep through a center/school - in the US and now here. It is worse here because the centers are easily twice as crowded, not to mention the fact that my center has no ventilation system (just unit air conditioners). I've only worked for three months at my center, and already have seen cases of nits, flu, coughs, colds viral rashes, hand foot and mouth disease (ew, gross - we don't even have that in the US) and impetigo (also, ew, gross). There are other factors in addition to the crowding that I'm sure add to the spread of germs, but one big one seems to be the general attitude that parents still try to send their kids to school when they're sick, or often don't bother to come pick them up right away when they're told they need to. Occasionally this would happen back in the states too, but not to the degree that it seems to happen here. I don't know if it's an Australian thing, since our center is very international and we have families from all over the world, but it's really irksome regardless. People don't seem to have the understanding that they are creating a public health issue when they expose their sick or infested children to lots of other people, and I find it quite selfish. So, people of Sydney, wherever you happen to be from, cut it out. Nobody wants your kid's germs. On the plus side, maybe I'm strengthening my immune system by being exposed to all this stuff? Hopefully?

To end on a more positive note, we had a discounted lunch at Vapiano today, a chain that we also used to live near back in the US. We didn't think it was very common outside of the DC area, so we were happy to see that there was one here when we moved. It was like having a little taste of home.