Rajakkadu- Home Sweet Home?

It's confirmed, we're total geeks. I've titled this one, "at least we have books for survival"

The rigging of the mosquito net.

Our flat from the street

The Accommodations
We are relieved to have finally arrived somewhere and unpacked. It feels good. But, I won’t lie, the conditions are a little to be desired. Leigh and I live in a concrete bunker of sorts. We are renting a flat from the owner of the town (read: Richest resident). It is three rooms, and did I mention it’s all concrete and damp and dirty? Our windows look out into a hallway that leads to the “Spice Board” office. Just allow me to gripe this once and then I won’t mention it again, but we have been furiously nesting the last three days to make it livable. This meant we went out and found a plastic table, some kitchen utensils, cleaning supplies, curtains, sheets etc. We are sharing our apartment with an array of other living creatures. The list so far includes; one millipede (poisonous, no good), spiders, one cockroach, tiny geckos whom we’ve all named Gobi after a man we met at the restaurant in town and ants. We are trying our best to feel Zen about the whole thing. I do take great comfort at night knowing that I am sleeping under a mosquito net and therefore do not have to share my bed! In general, it seems more manageable now, although by no means homey.
We are renting a different place than the girls last year did. They were out of town, but we are smack in the middle of town. So, instead of the serenity and remoteness we were envisioning, we are located in the center of quite a hub-bub. In fact, I have never lived in a noisier place-city or otherwise. I have to wear ear plugs at night just to sleep. I think I have identified most of the sounds by now, which is comforting to at least know what they are. I decide to get out of bed in the morning in resignation that no more sleep is coming my way and I feel like singing a Sesame Street song about “these are the noises in my neighborhood, my neighborhood, lalala”. Oof. Let’s see if I can describe some of them:
The neighbors’ television tuned to the Malayalum MTV station (concrete creates quite an echo, by the way)
The corrugated tin roof of the hallway, bending in the wind and rain (imagine an enormous, gigantic piece of tin foil rustling)
Sheets of rain pummeling everything in sight
The leaky faucet in our bathroom running on the tile floor (again concrete plays a magnifying effect here, think Chinese water torture)
Power tools – incidentally the store is beneath my bedroom. Vroooom!
On the roof there is a rusty squealing sound coming from the metal bars used to reinforce the concrete structure, which are left open and are blown by the wind
The Spice Board Meetings (AGAIN, concrete echoes, you must keep that in mind always
4:30AM a man on a microphone, coming from somewhere nearby, starts chanting – we suspect it is either an hour long Muslim prayer call (which seems unlikely to me) or it is emanating from the nearby Church, whose denomination we are entirely unsure about
The radios of the stores across the street blare high-pitched women’s voices “singing” in an indistinguishable Asian style. It would be really neat music, except when you can’t escape it.