Chez Natasha

“It’s normal,” people say, “you live in Amsterdam, what did you expect?”. Don’t I feel stupid! There were no mice in Rotterdam, Nijmegen or Delft when I was there! Wait a minute… there were mice at my workplace in Amsterdam back in 2000, and that was one of those downtown mansions that companies buy because nobody else can afford them.

Tell the landlord? They visit him too, he lives upstairs. So I boarded up that space between the kitchen cuboards and the floor that had mouse-size holes for their midnight snacks and hid my edibles in a closed cupboard. Just try me, topolini! (Topolino is Italian for Mickey Mouse, so topolini is my made up plural of it). Get a cat? The landlord doesn’t allow animals. The dog downstairs is being evicted in two months, but that’s a whole different story.