The House

Next to my apartment building, there is an old ruined two floor house. I can see it very clearly from where I sit in the windowsill, in my bedroom, when I’m bored. At first, I thought no one could live in a building like it, but I realized that not everybody has a house which is “livable” according to western standards.
The house I’m talking about looks forsaken, but smoke rises from its chimney which is one of the few signs that someone is living there. The roof, which is no longer completely covered with snow, is made of thin rusty metal plates. The plates, which are no longer whole plates, have lots of holes in them and the mud and dirt which is used as insulation is visible. There are some unnecessary looking metal poles sticking up from the inside where the power wires and a whole bunch of other cables and wires are attached. They all look like spaghetti which has been boiled a little too long. Long pointy icicles hang down from the edge of the roof and scare the people who walk by them.
The walls are made of very natural looking rock blocks. Their color is a mixture of gray, back and white. There is an unnaturally large space between the blocks which is filled with cement. There are a total of five windows in the front part, which is the only part visible from my point of view. They are all broken in some way, and the windowsills, which were originally white, are now dirty brown. Not only is the paint peeling off, but also the wood itself; it is possible to see huge missing pieces of wood. The curtains inside the windows are a discolored blue and pink plaid. Some of them are half torn down. All of the windows, except the windows in the balcony door, are covered with white painted bars, even those on the second floor. Once they might have looked nice, but now they don’t. Some bars are missing and the white paint has turned black and brown.
A bright yellow water or gas pipe is another element that makes the house look alive; however they look old and the reddish brown rust is clearly visible. One of the window bars on the side of the first floor is covered with dead leaves that fell from a tree which is growing upwards against the wall. On the other side, it is only possible to see the very top of the bars because of a huge blue container, which is probably used as a shed. You can hear a funny sound when the melting icicles from the roof fall and land with a crunch on the top of the container.
On the upper right section, there is a fairly new extension. Even though it was built recently, it looks almost as old as the rest of the house since no one has taken care of it. The white painted walls are not white anymore, but black as the window bars because of the polluted air. The window glass is not whole anymore and large plastic sheets have been put where there is no glass left.
There is a balcony in the middle of the wall on the second floor. It does not look very safe, because it is rests on shaky looking tiny cement blocks which are stacked upon each other. But it might be safe enough, because every morning, during the summer, people are sitting there drinking coffee. Long lines of string, covered with clothes hang from the balcony and over to the left window and another one to the right window.
There is also a small garden outside the house, which seems misplaced; it does not quite fit in with the environment around it. The blue container is placed in the middle of it and the garden looks like it has not been tended for a while.

I have seen different standards of living in different places of the world. What bothers me sometimes is why people don’t focus more on warm insulation and roofs which don’t leak, when they build their houses. I’ll conclude that not everybody is able to do this, either because of economic reasons or because of absence of information.