Hi there,
At the end of July 2023, we closed a home exchange to go to Narrabeen (Australia) during the months of March, April, and May.
Both parties had sent each other a video of our properties and we had a video call before finalizing the exchange.
We left Porto on March 3rd and arrived in Narrabeen 2 days later.
They had left us the key in a lock box outside the building.
My first impression upon entering the building was that these were the properties of the lower middle class of Australia.
The house was not what I expected or what I saw on the video. In person, the apartment was quite old and of very poor quality. They had tried to give it a “glow”, but it was still an old apartment.
I detail the good and the bad of this accommodation:
The good things:
- Location. The apartment was a 5-minute walk from the beach and the lake. A 20-minute walk we had the supermarket and bus stop.
- Cleanliness. Although the level of cleanliness is not as good as my house; the apartment was decent and more so when compared to the Durham house from our first exchange.
- Spacious kitchen. Compared to my home, this kitchen was more spacious and well equipped.
- Laundry area. The laundry area was in a separate room, and they had a dryer. On the downside, neither the dryer nor the washer worked well.
- Space. The apartment in general was not bad in terms of space and had a large terrace, although we did not use it.
- Garage. They had a covered garage, so we didn’t have to worry about where to park the car.
- Storage space. Compared to the exchange we did in Durham, here we had an empty closet and lots of storage space in the kitchen.
- Netflix. The Netflix quality here is better than what we have at home.
Downside
- Noisy. There was a lot of traffic noise and to top it off they were doing renovation works in the apartment below, so workdays were hellish.
- Windows. The windows in this apartment are of very poor quality and do not insulate the noise coming from the street. So, with the windows closed, the outside noise was the same.
- Qualities. The apartment in general is very old and of poor quality.
- Work areas. There was only one complete work area (desk + office chair) and a desk where I had to work with a dining chair.
- Bathroom. There was only one bathroom which was very old. The toilet malfunctioned; when you defecated, you had to flush 3 or 4 times to get it all down.
- Bathroom exhaust fan. The bathroom only had one light that directly turned on the exhaust fan which was extremely noisy. There was no way to turn on the light without the extractor fan turning on.
- Slow WIFI. Another thing that made it quite difficult for us to work and even use social networks.
- Old mattress. If the mattress in the Durham house was too soft for me, the one in this house was to throw it in the trash. It was extremely old and falling apart; to top it off, when we changed the cover, we saw that it was full of orange stains it made us very sick. I had the feeling that they had hidden their mattress and left a mattress they had picked up from the garbage.
- Vacuum cleaners. In our house we have 3 vacuum cleaners and here there was only one.
- Small dishwasher. In our house we run the dishwasher once a day, but in this house because the dishwasher was so small, we had to run it 2 or 3 times a day. In addition, it did not work well either and always left more than half of the things dirty.
- Kitchen exhaust fan. The kitchen exhaust fan was not connected to the exhaust pipe, so the smoke stayed in the same place.
- Air conditioning. As the heat in March was unbearable, and the apartment received direct light all day, we had to have the air conditioning on from 10AM to 18h. The air conditioner had no water channeling system so all the water that came out of the air conditioner fell on the neighbors below and it was not damaged, it was just that the owners had it that way as if it was normal. After the second week, you turned it on and the air came out hot instead of cold.
In addition, there was only one air conditioner that did not cool the rooms, so during the day you could only be in the living room.
- Living room lights. In the living room there were two lights that could be dimmed, but they had some problem because you turned them on and they started to flicker, which was unbearable and, in the end, we could not use them.
- Curtains. The curtains in this house were almost all semi-transparent so they reduced practically nothing of the sun’s intensity, which also made it quite difficult to work.
- Sofa. The sofa only had room for two people, so you could only sit on it (not lie down); it was also made of plastic (imitation leather) and we had to put a sheet over it because it stuck to your skin and was uncomfortable.
- Cockroaches. Diego had to get up at 2:30 a.m. for his company meetings and always found cockroaches in the bathroom.
Although you can see that the list of bad things is quite long, we had adapted well to what bothered us the most which was the noise and we had not even given too much importance to the rest of the things.
As I told you, we arrived on a Tuesday and Mar and Val arrived at our house on a Thursday. When they started complaining about the cold, rain, and humidity of Porto as if it was our fault, and created a hostile and uncomfortable situation, it was there that we realized and internalized the many shortcomings of this apartment.
We didn’t complain about anything because it is unrealistic to think that the house I go to on exchange is going to be as clean or as comfortable as my home is for me. But once they started complaining, we added up the faults of the house and there were so many.
On the other hand, here we were in an apartment where even the toilet did not work properly, with a lot of traffic and neighbor noise, and to top it all, we had to deal with two people who, besides being rude, behaved like children.
In a future post I will tell you how the arrival of Mar and Val to our house was, who made our life impossible because of their continuous complaints since they set foot for the first time in our property.