We're on the second floor (but Laci would call it the third floor) of a traditional apartment building with a courtyard in the middle. Since there are buildings on either side of us, all the units face into the courtyard, except for a few on the front which have windows out to the street. There is no elevator in this building because there are only four stories. If you are closer to the top you have to climb more stairs, but you also get more sunlight in your windows.
In order from left to right: Emma's window, the double front doors,
the kitchen window, and Laci's window.
Emma is sitting on her windowsill. A lot of the neighbours
have bars on their windows, but for some reason ours don't. This kinda sucks because
we can't open our windows, say at night, without allowing the possibility of
someone climbing in.
You can see the shutters partway down on Laci's window. All our windows have them, just like every window on every apartment building we've
seen so far. We usually shut them when we leave so people can't see what we have to steal. They are also very useful for blocking the sun
when you want to sleep in. It could be almost noon and you will think it is still the middle of the night.
View of the courtyard from the balcony outside our front door.
Emma has double doors on her room too. It seems obvious that it was intended to be a living room, but we are using it as a second bedroom.
Ikea futon bed, wardrobe and couch. The furniture all came with the apartment.
Emma LOVES her bright orange couch which goes for about 300 dolla' Canadian at Ikea. There is also a fairly large tv that came in the room but it only gets two Hungarian channels and Emma wanted to use the table it was on as her bedside table so she put it away in one of the huge cupboards we have. We are thinking we might take it out and make use of it if we can figure out how to get an afforable cord that attaches the laptop to the tv, allowing us to watch tv and movies from the internet!
The view out Emma's window. All on the windows have in our apartment have two separate frames on hinges, I guess from before they had double paned glass in a single piece.
Laci's room next to the kitchen. Here is more Ikea furniture that came with the place.
Notice that the bedrooms have really nice wood flooring. We also like the white tile in the kitchen, foyer and bathroom.
The lovely natural light in Laci's room.
The view from Laci's room if he sits on his bed and peers around the door in the morning. You cannot see it well, but Emma is acting European by pretending to smoke on the toilet.
The amazing kitchen. Decent sized fridge too, considering we saw a lot of apartments with only mini fridges.
We love the natural light in this place. The white walls and floors help too. It's nice to eat breakfast in the morning sun. This corner apartment is perfect for morning sunshine. Emma's window faces east and the foyer, kitchen and Laci's room face south.
Here you can see where the front door is in relation to the kitchen.
The green double front doors and our foyer. You can see the drying rack in the back there. Luckily the apartment was furnished with one, because no one has dryers here.
In this picture you can clearly see the 13 foot high ceilings. Every room the apartment has them. From the apartments we've seen, 12 feet or sometimes higher seems pretty standard, but we are not sure why. It's really nice, but it means all the warm air rises out of reach and you have to walk up that many more steps to get to the upper floors.
The bathroom even gets natural light (thought you can't tell because we took this picture in the evening). Outside those two windows there is what they call the light box. It is just an open concrete column to let the light down. The people on the lower floors won't get much light from it. But we don't open those windows more than a crack, because pigeons live on the ledges out there!
We are so happy that we actually have a shower attached to the wall. We can't figure out how Hungarians shower and wash their hair while holding the shower head with one hand. Unfortunatly the shower curtain rod hasn't been installed yet, so by showering like Canadians we get water all over the floor.