I Officially Live in a Squat in Brooklyn

I don't think I've ever really discussed my room here, which is a complete and utter crime. My building is in South Kensington, one of those huge old white mansions in a street leading off Hyde Park. I'm on the top floor, meaning my ceiling does tend to slope a bit near the window, but I have a gorgeous view of the Royal Albert Hall and a teeeeny tiny little bathroom. It's bliss.

Ever since I started college, I discovered I can be a fussy sleeper. If it's bright or loud, it usually takes me forever to fall asleep. There's also next to no study space in our school library, so studying for classes in a quad would have been limited to balancing my laptop on a knee or lounging in bed. Neither of which I'm into. Soo I got the single, and it's been heavenly. Really.

I can come and go whenever I want and not worry about bothering anyone. Usually, it's dead quiet and I have no trouble falling asleep (I say usually because, of course, some dude moved across the hall a few weeks ago. He has loud and smelly parties every once and a while). I decorate. Dry clothes on any free inch of space.

The reason I started this story was-- I am generally overjoyed with my former hotel room turned economy size flat. However, being that I'm on the top floor, I've been having problems with the water heater in my shower.

I think a couple of hundred people live in the building, so it's normal to expect the hot water to run out before work in the mornings. When I occasionally oversleep to 8:15 or later, there's definitely no hot water left. That's to be expected and I've learned my lesson.

BUT.

I turned on the water this morning at 7:30 and there was nary a trickle to be seen. I turned the temperature knob toward the cold side-- the colder I made it, the more water showed up. This, obviously, really pissed me off. I was forced to shove my head upside down in the stand-up, closet-sized shower and wash my hair with freezing cold water. I managed to only get the majority of my pants and the floor soaked before I finished.

I was sort of pacing around with a turban, cussing and being annoyed, when I reached back in and turned the knob to warm so I wouldn't kill myself tomorrow morning. HOT WATER. OF COURSE. I basically leapt into the shower to rinse off my body and had a few blissful seconds of that before it trickled off into nothingness.

Seriously. Whaat. I have a very strong belief that people on the ground and first floors have boiling hot saunas every morning. Apparently, they're starting earlier now.