Gringrid in Chile: Apartment Post #2: Apartment Dilemmas

So it looks like "once a week" has turned into "once a month," but that's still a bit of progress. :)

I have lived in my apartment for more than four months now, and it is almost completely finished. A few things are still lacking (living room lamp to cover the bulb, nightstand, desk?) and I need to catch it at a particularly clean and organized moment to take pictures of the "finished" product, but it's a nice little depto. There were, as there tend to be, some hiccups at the beginning, however.

Exhibit A: The Fusebox

Less than a week at my new digs and the electricity goes out, which I soon discover to be a burnt fuse. Luckily the electrician got there pretty quickly and I didn't have to try to survive a night without light (ha! that rhymed...).

And before I knew it, my fuse box was as good as new:

Hooray!

Exhibit B: My First Refrigerator

Once upon a time Ingrid moved into an unfurnished apartment and needed to buy a refrigerator, the first major appliance she would ever buy. After hopping from department store to department store in Santiago Centro searching for the best quality for the best price, she finally decided upon what she thought was the perfect refrigerator. It wasn't too expensive, it had enough room for her gastronomical needs, it was energy efficient, and it even had a pretty sparkly silver coating that made her smile.

The only thing Ingrid did not love about the refrigerator was the ugly sticker on the door. Assuming that no one in the world would want to keep an ugly sticker on their fridge door, she concluded that it must come off quite easily. Little did she know it would take several painstaking minutes, totaling close to a full hour (spread out over a much longer period), to remove all but the little white remnants of the big ugly sticker. What remained was almost as ugly as the sticker itself had been.

Being the super-resourceful and internet-savvy 21st century girl she was, Ingrid turned to the incredible infallible internets to search for the best way to get rid of the last of the ugliness that remained on her new fridge so that it could at last shimmer in all of its sparkly silver glory, blemish-free.

She rejoiced, for the thought she had found the best remedy! Thank you, O Internets! She rushed to the kitchen for the sponge and soapy water that she had been instructed to obtain and began happily scrubbing the sticky spot, until all the ugly white bits disappeared!

Alas, as she looked at the spot where she had been scrubbing, she realized that the ugly white bits had taken the pretty sparkles along with them! This left an even UGLIER gray splotch on her previously perfectly sparkly silver surface.