The other day we drove past an apartment building in my city that was hustlin' and bustlin' with residents. Apparently this wasn't always the case, and still shouldn't be, as this building was never finished or rented out. But nonetheless, there are plenty of people setting up camp in there, sans water and electricity, living life as political protesters, squatters, okupas. I'm no expert on this subject, so some of my facts may be fiction, but here is what I've collected on the subject.
You are a rich Spaniard with a vacation home in Barcelona, which you renovated two years ago, but have since failed to utilize on account of your yaya dying up in the Basque Country in 2008 and some extraneous business distractions. However, this summer, nothing is standing in the way of visiting your Catalan escape, nothing, except a bunch of rasta chumps with dread lock mullets. Upon arrival, you become suspicious when you spot an unhealthy number of scooters parked in your drive way, but in spite of this, you proceed, only to find that your key no longer opens the doors to your own house. You knock angrily. Some shirtless hombre smoking some mota who studies Catalan poetry at a nearby university answers the door. He's accompanied by a whole hoard of them, spongin off your winnings in there, so you can't very well just tell them to leave, but you do anyways.
They respond with some incoherent rant about their social movement which promotes housing for everyone as a right and utilizes "abandoned properties" to demonstrate this. You high tail it to the local incompetent police, who by law can't do much of anything, proceed into a lengthy court process (in which the judge sometimes favors the squatters and looks at variables such as duration of abandonment, condition of the property, etc.), and eventually they are evicted from your property after you wasted your summer in court, spending the money that you had previously set aside for drinking cervezas on the beach. The hombres get a little smack on the wrist and move on to find another vacant site of their choosing to reside in, which they probably had loads of time to look for while they lived in your house rent free all summer. The least they could have done was wash their grimy hair in your new lion foot bathtub.
Check it out....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squatting#The_Movement
So this example isn't exactly the most common or accurate, the more frequent being run down urban buildings and unfinished apartment buildings, but it was a little more entertaining. Upon reading this, I had two dominating ideas enter my thinking.
1. How well could I manage living sans electricity and indoor plumbing? I know I can score free wifi from the parking lot at McD's. This sounds like a good deal....
2. In so many cases life seems to benefit those who sit around leaching off of others productivity, which in a twisted way sort of defines my situation right now. How is it that I was spending thousands of dollars a year to work my butt of in school and am now getting paid to sit around and study what I want and go on free vacations all expenses paid? PLUS I have electricity and water... I think I'm going to go wash my grimy hair and read in the bathtub....
Ok, I just found out that they use generators, they too have electricity.
No comments:
Post a Comment