Life and Death
The first few days in Bilbao have been interesting. I managed to finally see one of my favourite architectural wonders up close, I had a chandelier fall down and almost kill me, and now it started raining. Wait, what? A chandelier almost killed me? Indeed, it almost did: I was resting and/or working (I don’t always know the difference since writing this can be rather relaxing at times) in my room when all of a sudden there was a massive boom-crash-end-of-the-world sort of noise as the rather large chandelier that made my room look so quaint came down and hit the foot of the bed, missing my toes by mere centimeters. Had I been standing underneath the damn thing, I would not be writing this for you right now, I am sure! To say I was a bit freaked out is an understatement, but, thankfully, I was unhurt and the chandelier itself, amazingly, suffered only minor damage.
I was lucky that this just happened to be the day the cleaning lady was in the apartment dealing with the horrid mess the young ‘uns left for her, so I flagged her down and she immediately contacted the property managers and got a repair guy to come. Good thing I hadn’t planned on doing much that day so waiting for him wasn’t a big chore. When he did show up, he was just as mystified as I was as to the reason for this calamity but he expertly got down to business and started to put the lamp back up. I have to admit that caused me to raise an eyebrow … I wasn’t sure the potentially deadly appliance (is a lamp an appliance?) had survived its fall but I guess partially hitting the bed cushioned it. I watched in amazement as the very nice handyman manhandled into submission the ancient-looking wires, reattached most of the fallen bits of crystals (it is a chandelier, after all, not just any ceiling lamp), reinserted the candle-like lightbulbs, and voilá, I had a working light again, this time properly secured and no longer a potential death trap, or so I hoped.
While he was working, however, the apartment residents’ WhatsApp group started buzzing with messages, with someone complaining rather vociferously that the power had gone out in the apartment and they were in the middle of doing an online exam so WTF? I felt horrible for this poor soul but the choice would have been having the nice handyman get electrocuted instead and that’s a lot worse. He did shout out a warning before flipping the switch … but I guess headphones can be a bad thing on occasion.
Speaking of electricity, this “planned” outage was just the first of many that I realized I was causing, though at first I didn’t think it was my fault. You see, my 110V/220V converter and this building did not get along at all, and every time I tried using it and did not get the prongs in just at the right angle, it would throw the fuse. I guess I have no choice now but to search for a proper extension cable for my MacBook, something that will give me not only a safer electrical connection but also a few extra feet of cable: win/win!
