share-housing

✬ although we came here for the sunshine, and to escape sweden's miserable autumn, for some reason i was so excited to look out the window this morning and see a dark, grey, cold sky, pouring with rain. it's real snuggle-by-the-fireplace weather. pity our apartment has no heating.

i'll have to get used to the cold, since in two weeks time we're heading to Åre, the ski resort in the north of sweden. we've already got jobs lined up at a restaurant/ bar called 'beefalo's' as well as in a new cocktail bar that's opening up there. jerry's friend is the manager of both places and he's also got a room saved for us in his big 5 bedroom share-house.

back to good old share-housing.... i could write a book just about all the weird housemates i've had over the years, but it would turn out too much like the book 'he died with a falafel in his hand' (which i recommend).

while i was at uni, i lived in multiple share-houses in melbourne. the one that saw the most action was a 4-bedroom victorian hotel, renovated into a beautiful town-house in a cool suburb called fitzroy. i rented it for about three years with two of my good friends, pat and sarah consecutively, but we always had two rooms spare to fill... and we seemed to be continuously kicking someone out or being left in the lurch.

i don't know what it was about that place but it was like a magnet for freaks. our interviews for housemates were like auditions for circus-performers.
amongst one of the line-ups, i remember a genuine, pledged hare-krishna, with the shaved head and proper orange garb; a gay goth who arrived in a black dress but claimed to be a white witch, offering free spells if we gave him the room; and a scary 17 year old goth girl who we were sure would either kill us or herself if we didn't choose her.

of the ones we did choose, the most memorable were; misho, the yugoslavian fashion-design student who had reached some higher spiritual realm and remembered all his past lives: he was a japanese samurai in one, an egyptian warrior protecting some queen in another, and an extra-terrestrial being of some kind in another. interesting that he was never some insignificant balinese peasant or even just an ordinary joe blow from next door...

and then there was sarah from tasmania, otherwise known as 'sarah the slut', who wore only underwear and scarves around the house and hit on every single one of our male friends who visited and then all our boyfriends and even succeeded in sleeping with mine!

i could never have complained about having a boring home life. there was never a dull moment! and i guess share-housing taught me a lot about humanity. it's gonna be interesting to step back into that world again.....

:o)