Love thy neighbor! 

For most of my life, I’ve lived in three/four bedroom homes ( Yes, I know what you’re thinking and yes I was a little spoilt!) but when we moved to Denver, we were moving to a two bedroom apartment. Honestly, it is a lot fancier than most apartments in the area. We have two huge pools, a fully functional gym, a hot tub, a trail, tennis courts (they should pay me for this sales pitch)(also obviously still spoilt). Anyway, I digress. So moving to an apartment meant interesting, funny, strange and sometimes downright crazy neighbors. In the one year of us living here, we’ve met, seen and heard all sorts of neighbors. Would you believe it’s not the Indians that made for interesting stories? The following neighbors have been rated on three scales – weird but harmless, Crazy and Oh hellll no! 

The Potheads – So we come back home from the gym and first we are greeted with wafts of chicken curry smells from the Indian apartments. So imagine our surprise when the chicken curry smells now had a weird smokey tinge that definitely wasn’t a cigarette. Our suspicions were confirmed when some teenage boys ran down the stairs and into a car with blazing music. PS – Marijuana is legal in Colorado if you didn’t know already. verdict: CRAZZY kids!

The Rugrats – These are the bratty Indian kids who have no regards for rules. They run across the street screaming and fighting with each other. They are also the only ones wearing a fleece hoodie and pants in summer while the American kids are shirtless trying to get a tan.  We recently got an email from the leading office telling us the pool was closed indefinitely due to an incident and also included a bunch of rules of who was allowed in the pool and hot tub. We aren’t sure, but I’m almost convinced one of the Indian kids pooped in the pool.   a new category here :ANNOYING but harmless.

The Indian Aunties: The Grannies and grandpas visit from India to see their new grandkids. Recently, a lady stopped me as I got out of my car not caring that I was doing a balancing act with 6 bags in each hand since I had just come from the grocery store. Short of advising me on my marriage, she told me about herself, her family, asked about mine, what I do,etc. It didn’t end there. H is a generous and kind guy. He will offer to help anyone and even give money to an alleged homeless guy even though we were quite sure he just wanted to buy drugs. So when we saw this lady carrying a suitcase, he offered to help her. She obviously took full advantage and now H is her official porter. She made him carry all her suitcases,  wait till the car came and load them into the car and wait till she left. All of this would have been fine if her son and daughter in law weren’t right there! Verdict : Weird but harmless. 

These funny and harmless neighbors are the bottom feeders in the neighborhood pyramid of crazy! It only gets worse!!

The future of America or is it the present? (wink wink): like I said, H is extremely generous so when he came home from work, a kid with hair brighter than the sun no more than 10 years old approached him with a very enticing offer, “do you wanna gimme some money?” Obviously, H said “How much?” And the kid said, “How much ever you have!” Thankfully, H wasn’t conned, apologized to the kid and came upstairs, a little frightened. A few minutes later, the kid knocks on our door and when I open it, he apologizes for knocking on the wrong door. He went on to do this a couple of more times in less than half an hour, apologizing each time for knocking on the “wrong door”. We are still trying to figure out what he was trying to do! The same kid tried selling us a blue crab and even his own DOG. When I went to throw the trash (clearly I do that a lot), I heard him and his younger sister using the F word multiple times and he definitely had a can of Corona in his hand. Now every time we see this kid, we avoid eye contact, because creepy little kids scare us! Verdict : Oh helllll no!!

The Crazy Cat lady : I saved the best for last. In the first week of moving in, we had the cops knocking on our door, the fire engines coming and a lady being escorted by five firemen (very hot ones, mind you). We saw an eviction notice on our neighbor’s door but thought maybe it was just a rent issue. A couple of days later, a cop knocked on our door and asked me if I’d seen my neighbor who lived directly opposite us. I told him we had just moved in and hadn’t seen anyone. He promised me it was nothing to worry about.. Yeah sure, Mr. Copman, you’re here to have tea and biscuits with her, aren’t you? Another couple of days later, the cops arrived with the firemen, knocked on her door (yes I was watching through the peephole, it was too much excitement for Week 1 in the US). A lady came out, covered in a bathrobe, with curlers in her hair, shivering from head to toe. She mumbled something about her cat who was dead or missing. Emergency services escorted her out and didn’t even bother to go into her apartment. That was the last time we ever saw her or any cat!! Turns out she had no cat but had some personal issues. We guess she was evicted because she didn’t pay rent and tons of other stuff. There were bags of trash outside her apartment that blocked our door. The leasing office said she wasn’t coming back but her friends and relatives would come and clear her stuff. During the moving out, we saw a ton of crap outside her garage – dirty mattresses, old boxes, old clothes and get this – A hugeeee bag of cat food and a cat crate!!  Now all I’m hoping is there is no dead cat in our walls. verdict – oh helllll no!!

Crazy dog woman –this one Indian girl always comes squealing to us. She doesn’t bother giving us a second look but she hugs our dogs, tells us about how she has two dogs back home and wishes they were here! And then she walks off only to do this all over again with every neighbor’s dog! Verdict – obviously the best kind of human! 

One year and a bunch of crazy neighbors later, we’ve renewed our lease because my life is like Rear Window and clearly I have as much inspiration as Hitchcock! Of course, we are still worried when we hear a knock on the door because it could be the Corona holding, swear word using, animal selling kid or even worse – a DEAD CAT!!
Signed,

Crazy Dog woman