Sunday Part Three-New Friends?

Perhaps this may have been tolerable had I the opportunity to sit and fume on my own, open my carefully protected bottle of anti-freeze and swallow several glasses at a time until the situation seemed as funny as it does in retrospect. No such luck. I was to meet my exotic new flatmates. When the segreteria had informed me that I would be sharing with other students, I had all sorts of beautiful dreams- bohemian types, perhaps, artistic, fascinating people from far flung places who enjoyed very old books and alcoholism as much as I do. One of them would probably have a guitar, to which we would sing giddily through the night, smoking joints in piazzas and falling into fountains and shit. The reality could not be more different.

Warning bells should have been ringing when I saw an elderly woman with heavily dyed hair pottering about making tea.

"His wife. Must be his wife. They'll bugger off as soon as he's found the fucking key."

Then a very blonde, very bland looking type smiling a little too broadly for my liking.

"His...daughter?"

After the thirty-fifth key had been tried, I was ushered in to join my new friends.

"I am [insert generic Polish name here], and this is my grandmother."

GPN is studying as my school for all of two weeks, and did not wish to embark upon an undertaking of this magnitude alone. Wow. Is that quite sweet, or just weird? Answers came thick and fast (not from Granny though-Granny doesn't speak English, but does smile relentlessly to make up for it, which becomes unsettling pretty quickly). An excerpt from our first exchange, by way of illustration:

GPN: "I went to London once. It was really weird."
Me: "Oh really? How so?"
GPN: "So many Muslims! I didn't think they existed!"

Gosh. How to respond? Of course, being English, I panicked.

Me: "Hehehe...Yeah."

Too tired (and, frankly, baffled) to enter into any meaningful dialogue upon racial tolerance, I decided to leave it at that. Needless to say however, I sensed from this brief interaction that we probably wouldn't be kindred spirits, and that, probably, neither of them had a guitar.