Alex, do you actually live in an apartment? Your grandmother's place in Vienna sounds absolutely charming and quaint and quiet, the kind of place you could live all of your life and feel like it was HOME!!!!
In California, apartments seem more like places people live until they can afford a house, or when they are very young and just out on their own. And people whose children have left home live in them as well sometimes, tired of all the yardwork and home repair projects.
Apartments to me are just one notch less annoying than having roommates, probably because of just the loss-of-privacy issues you are discussing. There is a new housing experimentatation I read about in the newspaper, just now being tried in California, but coming from northern Europe, called co-housing. Each family owns its own apartment/house, but they are around a commons of some sort, and everyone hangs out on front porches and SUPPORTS each other, and they cook communally and have LOTS of meetings.
It sounds to me like living on a kibbutz, or even having a bunch of new relatives, some of whom you like more than others!!! And some people try this and sell their houses, because they are so overwhelmed by loss of privacy issues and all the time it takes to have meetings and socialize after work that there is nothing left for themselves. I think you have to be very sociable in general to feel comfortable in this kind of situation.
With a little screamer of your own arriving on the scene soon, I hope you have plenty of empty space around you. Calming a baby with colic, or walking a crying baby back to sleep, is stressful enough without hearing people throwing shoes at the walls you share with them, just to express their angry FEELINGS!!!!! |
