My Apartment/Dorm

This post is going to be dedicated to where I'm staying, which is called the Irish Institute for Europe in Leuven.  The building is an old monastery that was built in the early 1600's that was recently completely renovated into this institute.  All of the rooms are multi-level 3-4 person rooms, except for mine.  They decided to take a 1 person room, throw another bed in it, and call it a double.

So Cesar(my roommate) and I are living in a pretty cramped room.  I'd say it's about the size of, if not slightly smaller, than my freshman year dorm room.  I guess it's not a terrible thing though since I don't expect to spend much time in there.  The good thing, is that it is all new!  The beds, the bathroom, the floors, everything.  They haven't put in ethernet ports for the internet in our rooms yet, which is supposed to come today, but in the meantime we have wi-fi in our lobby area.  The cool thing is that they kept sustainability in mind when renovating, everything is really efficient.  All of the lights in the entire building are motion sensored, so they won't turn on unless someone is walking down the hallway, which is cool, except for late at night when the hallways are pitch black and you have to wait for the lights to turn on while walking down them.  Then in our room, the lights won't turn on unless you take your room keycard and put it in this slot where the lightswitch is, and leave you keycard there.  Basically so you don't leave the lights on when you leave, because if you do, you will be locked out because that means your keycard is still in the wall in your room.  The toilets are all dual flush, meaning they have separate flush functions if you went #1 or #2, and the shower dials have different options for 25, 50, 75, and 100% flow of water so you don't waste unnecessary amounts of water if you don't mind taking a shower with half the water pressure.  We sleep here, take classes here, and also eat here.  Our rooms are all upstairs, and we have a few big classrooms on the first floor where we take our classes and then there is a cafeteria where there's a few full time chefs preparing every meal for us.  They're not here for just us, but this institute is open to all students, from undergrads to Phd's, that are traveling here to study for however long to stay, so it's a hotel of sorts.  There are groups who stay here for a few days, a week, and then our group who is here for a few months.  It's rather cool though because it is an Irish institute, so all of the staff are Irish.  A pretty cool place to stay and the building has a lot of character because it is so old.