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This has been the most un-vacation vacation I've ever been on. My car broke down and I had to sell it, about 400km from where I live lmao. That whole ordeal took multiple days, but I didn't let that bother me too much. Goodbye first car, you've served me... okay? I learned a lot about cars with you!! Next, my parents have to move out at a month notice because our building will be going through earthquake renovation (4 years after the earthquake xd), news we received on our first day of vacation. And as icing on the cake, one of my connecting flights was cancelled so my husband and I had to suffer through delayed flights, find a stay for an extra day and so on. Bad luck really comes in threes! Most of this stress has been easily ignored though, because I spent tons of time with my mom and my sister, and there's really nothing we can handle when together... And we prevailed! We often say here that it's not smart to trust island mechanics and BOY is that true. We didn't entrust our car to any of them as they all sounded incredibly flippant and flaky over the phone. I also learned that it's good to have a towing service included in your insurance or through your job (god bless my mom for having it).
In the end, the biggest problem is left for my parents to deal with - moving out. A couple years back we had engineers (or whatever, idk anymore) come look at our building and the conclusion was it would have a "minor" renovation in the future that would strengthen it but that there weren't any larger fixes involved that would require people to move out. There's a whole document detailing how much it would cost (around 400k€ if i remember correctly - which would be covered by the government) and what the fixing would entail. Out of nowhere, 3 years later, we get news that actually everyone has to move out, everyone has to completely empty out the apartments including kitchens, floors, windows, doors with only toilets and baths being allowed to stay - and the cost would have to come out of our pockets??? The cost of storage, moving things out, removing windows/floors/kitchens etc... nothing would be covered??? And the renovations would last a year. The only thing that the government would cover is the rent, which btw they're supposed to find a place for the tenants but instead they just sent everyone a form for subsidizing the rent costs and for us to find a place of our own... in a month. One of our building representatives went to the local government office to inquire about this... ridiculousness and she basically said the people working there were hardly aware of what's going on and they have no idea in which manner these renovations are being conducted, and that they all acted flustered while waving their hands because they can't do anything. The saying "the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing" has been thrown out a lot among the tenants here lmao. After the initial shock subsided, we received some news here or there. APPARENTLY.... the construction people are going from apartment to apartment to tell them where exactly the work will be done, so maybe there won't be any need to move things out after all? Maybe we will just have to relocate living room stuff to the bedroom or something? Nothing is certain, and everyone is still confused and in complete chaos. Of course the people that don't live in our building and are just landlords are very happy about this and were the first to empty out their stuff, but most of the people here have lived here for 30+ years, with nowhere else to store their stuff or nowhere to move. This building was built for the workers of a factory in the 60's, meaning most people living here aren't that well off today, including my parents. My dad got this apartment from his dad...
To say all of this is probably illegal and unethical is not an exaggeration, but as always stuff like this will probably go unnoticed in my country lmao. Ever since receiving the news we've been hearing more and more horror stories like this happening in our town, so I'm hoping people will raise their voice a bit. It also really sucks that I'm stuck watching this from afar now...
All of this mess happening to me in the past 3 weeks made me kind of ignore online stuff completely. I received a lot of kind and interesting e-mails which sucks because I've been completely distant lmao. If I haven't responded to you yet I will over the week I promise! I swear this is the first time I've gotten like 7-8 e-mails in a month. Everything always has to happen all at once. I've also neglected my online friendships because of this, which, while I think it's important to take a breather from the Internet every once in a while, is generally something I don't practice so I have some guilt about not answering and participating in fun conversations... Let it be known, I always lurk though.
In the same vein, I'm so out of the loop with the olympics controversies but the little I have been exposed to kind of got on my nerves. It feels like a lot of people with xyz political stances (even ones I agree with) just used these controversies to fuel their own agendas with complete disregard for everything else, and everyone looked completely uninterested in learning about the actual truth and intricacies that went into this - just hammering about their own opinions and nothing else, just black and white as usual... Anyway it's time to stretch my hands and start reading a bit about this, although I'll probably just get annoyed.