01-XI-2008.
We took the long trip to Undersville and then Blacksburg. Managed to meet the agent almost on time - and had I stopped to look at the maps (that I printed the previous evening) again, we may have made it on time. Never mind - we got it, and actually downed the price from 30k$ to 20$ without haggling. Which probably means we could have got it for even less, as it was on sale half a year and no takers.
The agent is a nice southern lady, with all the proper accent and flexions of the speech, charmed us all and seems to have been charmed as well.
We actually didn't know for sure that we got it until the time we got home the next day, but we had a serious hunch, because the dialog went like this:
Agent: so make an offer, how much would you give for this?
(she to me, in serbian): da joj ponudimo dvadeset pet hiljada pa ako hoće, hoće (let's offer her twentyfive thousand and if she will take it then she will)
Me (to agent): if we started haggling from 20 grand where would we meet
Agent (starts speaking as soon as I said "grand"): she may take it. Phew, why didn't I start from fifteen...
The house is a riot - built in 1930, and the original parts still hold, specially the few leftover pieces of furniture. What was added later, or used as to fix the issue, looks like it was done on the cheap, and even that was done bad. The floor in the main room was ripped out to make room to dig in the ducts for the AC... but that seems to be done halfheartedly, and was abandoned anyway. Upstairs, lots of cheap attempts to make it look nice, but without actually attempting to fix the roof.
The wall on the left shows that the prevous floor was a foot above this. Whoever attempted this dig-in wanted to make the room taller.
The bathroom is upstairs, and it looks it worked as long as the house had power and water. There's enough kitch to fill a small museum, but this toilet paper holder, with its own radio, is the champion. Whose bright idea was it to produce such a gadget, and what kind of people bought it... I wonder whether it has its own power line, or one needed to check batteries before crapping.
Visited Lena's gang in Blacksburg. Doled out apples we bought along the way (also bought REAL tomatoes, half a bushel!), looked like a dealer came to the 'hood. Walked around with them, enjoying the belated leftovers of summer.
Ate in student's mess hall - menza is a menza is a menza, despite the great, not-gray-at-all colors and all the fancy stuff, the smell and the spirit are the same. Comes with the territory, called "cooking for too many people on one place, trying to do it cheap", and produces the same result.
The Virginia Tech university (the one where there was a shooting on 16th of april the year before) is true american, by configuration and buildings. Blacksburg is just a random wolfucksville, in a wide valley between two branches of the Appalachies, where there's nothing else, practically the whole place serves it. There's the wide meadow in the middle, and the buildings surround it, all novogradnja. And then, in true american style, it's covered in stone plates, rough on the outside, to make it look like it's built of stone. Of course, half a minute of observation suffices to understand that it's all fake - first of all it's impossible to make a straight beam above the windows out of just stone, and then do that two five hundred times, not to mention that on the corners one sees that the stone is two inches thick, so it's obviously covered with, not built with stone.
But this is America, imitation passes everywhere.
Found a room in a local Hilton. Despite the name, no luxury at all, just an ordinary hotel room. At least it was somewhere downtown, a couple of blocks away - not that there's anything there that's more than six blocks down any street. Forgot to lock the car and left the Fujica in it, so I went down and took a couple of nice shots while I was at it.
Mentions: 21-XI-2008., Fujica, Jelena Sredljević (Lena), novogradnja, Undersville, in serbian