The hunt part 1

I had an appartment viewing this morning. The place is about 20 min from the university (according to the guy that lives there. It took me 30 min from my hostel, and its closer, but maybe he knows a short cut?). The place is decent, it's part of a complex, so you enter off the street and decend 2 flights of stairs (outside) to get ti the front door, but the whole area is covered in foliage a la Vancouver on steroids style that seems to be the norm here. 

I'm eating lunch( ham and cheese croissant with a mocha) in a coffee shop while being harrased by a sparrow that helped himself through the open front door.  That's another norm it seems: the front doors to shops and even some of the malls are open. I've walked past 3 or 4 different shopping centres where you can see an escalator inside from the street. Everything is dirtier and more run down than I was expecting, but I think this indicative of the climate rather then the lack of upkeep.