What you see is what you get: a small apartment for one or two, conveniently located near Copacabana.
There are some things that bothered me, but nothing from Maria or her management:
- A smoker, just around the corner. The smoke comes in, and closing the windows really doesn't do a whole lot. (Keeping the bathroom door closed helped more.)
- Construction, every day from 8am to 10am. Of course, I prefer to wake up at 10am, so I was left tired every single day. Someone pounding on concrete with a hammer really, really travels through the walls well.
- Someone had their ambient noise on every night to help them sleep -- and it reverberates through the open columns of the building. Not exactyl my ideal sleeping environment.
- That school kid with the recorder. Please, just stop.
- A lot of other sources of noise (trash chute, elevator, there's seemingly no end)
- The stove has an aluminum foil cover, with the burners just pressed through. This punched through the foil and with the cut-out circle blocked the gas until I fished the foil out of the tube down to the gas nozzle.
- The spin cycle on the washer doesn't work. It shrugs, and just doesn't spin. (It takes about three days hanging clothes inside to get them dry.)
The place is livable, and if you can sleep with earplugs and stay out when you're not asleep, it's perfect. It's also cheap -- for the price, it's hard to ask for for perfection. Still, it's not 5 stars because it just doesn't work for me; I'm just not comfortable going lower than 4 because nearly everything within the apartment was well maintained.
When you get there, there is a 24-hour door man. He'll see you (or you click the button) to get let through the outter gate; when you leave, he'll need to buzz you out. There are cameras on every floor, at every intersection, but the door man didn't quiz me on a friend coming in with me for a bit.