Alexandra Branzan

So, here I am in Gent. Very adventurous journey to get here, however. The story of it all is here… The key words would be: too much luggage, I’m never ever ever gonna pack so much again, I promise!

I am absolutely crazy about this place, already starting to feel bad I’m only staying here for one semester. The intercultural part is so much fun…we’re teaching one another basic words in our native language. The people at MOCOMA are mostly Spanish, but there are some Swedish, Estonians, French, too. I’m the only Romanian and they all say Romanian is hard to learn. I felt really satisfied when they started saying ‘neatza’ all day long, but soon found out they had completely forgotten the meaning of it. Can’t move on to the verbs, yet:))

I’m only here for one week and already had so many problems to deal with. First, my laptop broke and it took me a lot of Gent sightseeing to have it fixed. I doubt it there is any street of Gent I haven’t been on (or at least near to) in my everyday search for a compatible and affordable adapter. I gave up today and bought one for 70euro. I trembled at the sight of my laptop turning on, after such a long time of abstinence:)). And just when I was about to start a neverending chat, the lights were suddenly off. I waited and waited, everybody in the dorm started knocking and asking questions. And nothing. For the next 5 hours there was nothing.

The people at Sovoarte, the institution which owns the building, were so nice as to become unreachable. Just the thought of spending the entire weekend with no electricity drove me mad. I went for a walk to calm down and asked a lady on the street what was the name and phone number of the service in charge. She gave me the name, but couldn’t remember the number, so she advised I should call the info for the exact number. Which I did, just that the nice lady over the info put the answering machine on to tell me the number. So there I was, all frustrated and non-Dutch speaking, getting the precious information I needed…in Dutch!!! I went out again and asked some neighbours to call Electrabel for me. I explained what the problem was and the man offered to come and take a look. He was an electrician, lucky me! But he couldn’t see the problem when he checked the pannel. Taking ‘lucky me’ back. They called the service anyway…

Two hours later, we still had no electricity, but there was the Electrabel man in our house, writing a 135 euro!!!! bill for Sovoarte. The problem was in the basement, not outside the house, so he said it was not whithin his responsibility. He advised, though, that we go down and check for some red button to switch on. Quite a professional, what can I say! Finally Max, from Germany, had the guts to go down there and he brought the light back to us )

Electrabel, your people suck! Sovoarte, you suck, too! How dare you not answer you emergency number? We might as well have burned down the house! Hope you enjoy your 135euro bill. It should come with a note saying ‘you suck’ in German, Romanian, Sweden, Estonian and finally Dutch.
From Papegaaistraat no. 19, with love!