Dec 31: update

So another day here of life that is quite not  what it seems.  I awoke this morning at 1230am to the smoke,  the smell of burning tires or plastic.  The whole court yard was filled with it. This was after the landlord told some of us earlier that evening there had never been a problem around smoke at the hostal before.

The German guests at the hostal, who I had come across 26 hours earlier waving towels in their room,  had placed a bed cover around the door entrance to keep any smoke from seeping in. I was pissed. I went out into the street and went to the bakery next door and banged on what door I thought was theirs. No one answered.  So I banged on the landlord's door and rang the door bell.  No one answered. I ended up not sleeping very much, pissed off about the chemical smoke and thinking up what I was going to tell the landlord next morning. 

So 7am comes along and I walk up to the top floor to see if I can figure out what the Germans may have been looking at the night before.  What I saw shocked me. There was this tiny smoke stack sticking out in an area surrounded by the higher walls of buildings.  The 'problem' seemed to be structurally in place for awhile.  It seems that every early morning when the bakery gets going, smoke is created to start the fire and most likely started with some petroleum based product like plastic trash. This smoke simply falls into the hostals court yard as it has nowhere to go.

I confronted the landlord about the smoke. I was told that the landlord filed a 'denouncement' with the local authority about the smoke from the bakery, its impact on the health of the guests but nothing has happen yet. 

I was shocked that building code wise that any type of such smoke stack scenario could ever happen.  I can't imagine such a situation existing in the States.  I was also taken aback that not less than 16 hours earlier after being told there had never been a smoke problem,  the same landlord was telling me that they had indeed reported it and was waiting to see what happened. Nothing is what it seems goes hand in hand with the cultural thing here of not telling people the full story for fear of upsetting things or saving face.

The Germans told me later that they had gone over to the bakery earlier to see what was going on and saw that there was this old man making his livelihood. The Germans didn't want to make a deal of the situation by reporting anything for fear the old man might lose his work.

The end result, nothing changes. The landlord told me to just put the bed cover under the door to keep the smoke out.