The experience I had staying at this apartment was less than pleasant right from the beginning. First, the apartment’s door code was not the right one, I tried several times but it was of no use, the code wasn’t right. I sent an email to David letting him know that the door code didn’t work, he didn't answer, after 30 minutes I sent him another one, one hour passed and still, we didn't have an answer; I sent him another email, although all of us were tired from the trip we waited patiently for a response. After an hour and a half, we couldn’t wait anymore, it was 10:15 p.m. My brother started looking for a hotel while I located David’s phone number, I called and left him a voice message letting him know that I was leaving because I couldn’t enter the apartment, and he didn’t answer any of my emails. We took our luggage down to the street to go to a hotel, stopped a taxi, and when we were putting our luggage in the taxi’s trunk David sent a message with a new code. Since we had a reservation with David, I decided to try it only once more. The new code worked. I went down the stairs to take our luggage from the taxi, thank the driver, and give him a tip for waiting for us.
Once in the apartment, all of us had to use the toilet, and oh surprise, surprise! The toilet handle was broken! We opened the tank’s cover to flush it manually, but the flush valve was so rusted that it was already detached from the flapper, thus we couldn’t flush the toilet. Second bad thing. I notified David about the toilet.
Then, we were ready to go to bed and we had the third surprise from the night: the queen size bed is firm, almost hard, which does not provide a good night's sleep, but the bunk bed mattresses are the worst. The mattresses’ springs wires are covered with a very thin layer of cheap fabric, when laying down, one could feel all the metal wires on the body, all four single mattresses are the same: cheap and of bad quality. The blankets are very thin. It was almost midnight and at that time we were exhausted, sleepy, and cranky not only from the trip and the jetlag but from taking our heavy luggage up and down two floors through narrow, dark stairs twice in less than two hours, all of this in addition of waiting a long time to enter the apartment. Worthless to say that there is no elevator in the building. We needed to rest, or at least try to do despite the mattresses and the thin blankets.
The next morning the surprises didn’t end. There was no hot water to take a shower. What!!?? We had already business appointments scheduled so we took a shower with mild warm, almost cold water. David email me around noon telling me that the plumber would be at the apartment in the afternoon to fix the toilet. Since we had to go back to the apartment to change clothes to go to a formal dinner, we met the plumber there. Once he fixed the toilet and considered David’s slowness to respond and to solve any problem, I asked the plumber to fix the hot water situation; he tried his best but still, we didn’t have hot water in the shower. After the plumber left, David sent me three rude and unpolite emails telling me that I shouldn’t have asked the plumber to fix anything else besides the toilet. I informed David about the hot water the second day we stayed at his place but he never resolved it, instead, he got angry and defensive. All of us -my children, my brother, and I- had showers with mild warm, almost cold water the fourteen days we were at David's place. It wasn't a nice experience.
My trip to Mexico City was a combination of business and pleasure and I needed to use the internet often, well, the internet disconnected intermittently, most of the time we didn’t have a connection. The TV was the same, the few times we wanted to watch a movie or a series we saw only a few minutes and then it went off, it didn’t work for a few days. I notified David about these problems, but although he said that both services were up and running, the Internet and the TV didn’t work properly during our two weeks’ stay. We had to look for an Internet Café to use the web.
Besides all of the above, it seems that the apartment is a collection of the oldest, cheapest, and ugliest things. The furniture in the master bedroom is broken, there are no extra pillows or blankets; the sofas in the living room are stained and dirty, and one of them is missing a big bottom cushion that makes it almost impossible to sit comfortably on it. The chair in front of the desk wobbles and “dances” every time one sits down to work on the computer, and all the floors are dirty and ugly. The plastic curtain in the shower is short and when someone takes a quick, cold shower, the water spills out of the shower space making the bathroom’s floor a small, shallow ‘lake’; the shampoo provided are two small plastic 10 mg packets of the cheapest quality, same as the toilet paper, we ended up buying our own [toilet paper], and the towels are like sandpaper on the skin, it’s obvious that David does not want to spend a little money in fabric softener.
The flatware in the kitchen is of the cheapest quality one could find: the forks and spoons are small, almost flat, difficult to hold a salad or a liquid soup, the only three frying pans inside the oven are shallow, rust, old, and ugly; there is only one small dull