Hah!

[telophase]

Usually on House Hunters International you see American expats complaining about how small the rooms are, and asking for four bedrooms, three baths, and an enormous kitchen in an open-plan apartment with a great view for a rent 2/3 of what they need to pay for that.

So it's kinda nice to see an ex-Peace Corps volunteer who spent three years in the nation of Cape Verde (archipelago off the coast of West Africa) looking for an apartment in the capital city with a wish list that consists of a dependable water supply and a backup generator. And she went into ecstasy over the slightly-higher-than-budget apartment that had a solar water heater so she'd actually have hot water.

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Comments

[sleary.livejournal.com]

I wish I'd seen that one! We sometimes end up watching marathons of that show at my parents' house, and... yeah, mostly I want to smack people upside the head. An apartment the size of your Oklahoma prairie house, with open floor plan, in a historic building in Vienna. Riiiiiiight.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

There was a bit of "This room is kinda small," which usually annoys me no end unless it's the actual size of a closet, but in this case she and her roommate were framing it in terms of trying to work out who got the bigger room and who got the smaller one, which is a bit more reasonable than the usual sight of, say, an American surveying a room in a flat in the center of Paris that is positively spacious by Parisian standards and complaining because they can't fit their king-size bed in it.

(Although I don't know why nobody proposed the idea of the person who got the bigger room paying more of the rent!)

I know much of the show is directed by the producers telling the house hunters what to say, as I've poked around the intartubes for articles about the behind-the-scenes stuff, but I prefer the shows where you have Europeans doing the searching because they always say "It's so cozy!" instead of "It's so small!"