We had the pleasure of a 1-month stay at Paul's.
Host:
Polite, friendly, easy-going, and ready to help.
Location:
Downtown. 2 minutes walk to Metro station. Easy to get to restaurants, metro, buses, and entertainment.
Neighborhood:
Decently Safe. Challenging to find a parking place. There are a few parking garages nearby, but since it's downtown, parking garages do not offer a 1-month subscription. During this month, we had our car scratched with a key, and we had the front bumper scratched due to the poor parking skills of other drivers.
Buildings are located very close to each other. The apt's windows are directed to neighbors' windows with around 5-7 meters in between. Each morning, from about 5 am - 6 am, we were awakened due to the noise of garbage collection, which is three floors below.
Friendly and polite neighbors. No noise from neighbors at night.
Apartment:
Square: ~20m2. Two floors.
Kitchen: Heigh ceilings, spacious. Unfortunately, the dishes and plates were not clean enough. They were greasy, and the kettle was full of scale. We found someone's hair, lots of dust and killed ~6 spiders on the first day. The kitchen had an oven, microwave, dishwasher, stove, and refrigerator. The stove and oven were greasy, and decreased willingness to use it. The dishwasher is slightly undersized and can contain ~10 plates.
Main room: height ceilings (~4-5 meters). The issue with the laminate floor. The sofa was dirty and had lots of marks and spots on it.
Bedroom: the bedroom is located on the 2nd floor. The height from the floor to the ceiling is around 1 meter. Relatively hard to get to the second floor using a steep ladder. It's okay for a 1-2 nights stay but inconvenient for long-term usage. Wardrobes are located on the 2nd floor, and it's incredibly inconvenient to move all clothes back and forth to the second floor using the ladder. Thus, we didn't unpack our luggage for one month.
Bathroom and Toilet: all in all, they are okay. But there is a purpose why there are no pictures for them. The first night we had the toilet broken, but Paul was accessible and fixed it the next day.
Pantry: vacuum, iron, lots of other useful stuff. We used only a vacuum cleaner, but it was slightly broken. No cleaning was done for the pantry.
WiFi: 6-8 Mbps.
Temperature: the whole of Europe experienced enormously hot weather during this summer. Although the apartment didn't have an A/C, Paul invested his time and budget to get a portable A/C which made our stay better.
Work: to get the Internet working and be able to make video calls, we bought a local cell provider and hung the phone outside of the building on rope (the walls of the old building are very thick and do not pass through cell waves). The lighting for the whole apartment is done using two 100W light bulbs. We bought another portable lighting to reduce eye strain while working.
All in all, Paul's apt is a good place to stay for short time periods with an extremely close location to downtown.