Brad's Moving Out

So, after a long and arduous search I finally found a nice place to live. Let me tell you, it wasn't all that easy. When I first got here I spent a few days sending out email after email after email on Gumtree. It was a website I found in the states and the locals told me it was probably the best site to look at, even while here. I think I sent out 15 or 20 emails in the first few days and got 7 replies in return. The interesting bit was that 6 of those replies were scam artists.

Here's how it works. Once they know you're interested, they take down their add and tell you they figure you're the one who's going to get their apartment. It starts out the same way each time. The proprietor states they live far away and want to make sure that you have money to pay the rent before they come to town to let you see the place (some times from another country). But, they don't want you to pay them, they want you to use Western Union to send money to a friend of mine, any friend, someone I know that they don't. Then, when the friend receives the money order take the receipt and send a copy to the renter. It sounded dodgey, but I wasn't exactly sure how they'd get the money if I only sent a receipt after the transaction had been made. From what I learned later, apparently Western Union is very lax with security and the scam artist would just stop by their local office pretending to be your friend and trying to pick up the money. The other problem is that Western Union says it's your own fault for being dumb and won't pay you back. Luckily I didn't go this route, but it was VERY disheartening that out of seven responses, six were scams.

But there was one person who was an honest seller, so I went to see her. The place was kind of messy (not dirty, just stuff all over) and had a bunch of young Arab kids. None of them seemed all that happy to see me. But perhaps it was just because I was invading their home in the evening. I know I wouldn't have liked to have some random person checking out my house while I was watching TV. The girl was a student who was going home for the summer but couldn't get out of her lease for only 3 months, so me renting for the summer worked perfectly. I wasn't super thrilled about the place, but I said I'd take it. With all the scam emails I was getting I wasn't sure I was going to find anything else before my hotel days ran out. She said she'd get in contact with the landlord and get back to me. I told her that if I hadn't heard from her by Sunday I'd send an email.

So Sunday morning came and I still hadn't heard from this girl, so I sent an e-mail before I went out wandering the town. I came back Sunday night and hadn't received any response. So I waited.

On Saturday, while doing my laundry at a local laundromat, the nice Thai girl working there gave me a copy of the local newspaper. We had been talking about my attempts to find a place to live and she knew that the paper had a bunch of rental classifieds in it. So on Monday night, since I hadn't heard from the Arab girl yet, I started compiling an Excel list of info that I could use to call all the people that were renting places in the newspaper. It took a little while, so it was too late Monday night for me to start calling any of them. But now I had a list. There were also a few email addresses in the newspaper so I sent emails to those people. The two email people responded, but one place was already rented, and the other had a possible renter coming over so they wanted to see how that went before talking to me.

Tuesday I wrote another email to the girl with the apartment telling her that I assumed the reason she hadn't written me was due to the fact that she hadn't heard from her landlord and that I was going to start looking for another place to live. She wrote back and said she thought she had written back on Sunday but noticed that the email had been stuck in her outgoing folder and hadn't been sent. She said that she still hadn't been able to contact her landlord, but he was coming over on Wednesday so she'd talk to him them. I told her that I was going to keep looking for places just in case, but I wouldn't commit to anyone until I heard back from her.

So I started calling through my list of roughly 30 people. About 12 or 13 of them answered the phone but the only person who had a place available that was willing to rent for 3 months lived in a city that was 20 or 30 miles away. So I had whittled down my list, but I was getting no where fast. I only had another 5 days before my time at the hotel was up. I was a little worried to say the least.

So I went back to my desk and checked my email. It turned out that the landlord who was having people coming over to look at their place wasn't very thrilled about the people who had shown up. The possible renters seemed a little bit too odd for this guy because they were a couple trying to rent a small room with a single bed and they were covered in tattoos and didn't seem like very nice people. So, he was wondering if I could call him to set up an appointment to come see his place. I called him right away and tried to set up an appointment with him for later in the week, but he wanted to meet me and asked if I could come over that evening (it was already 9 pm). I said okay and got on a bus and headed over.

The guy's name was Cesar and he was a Brazilian/Italian man living here with his wife and son. They had a double room and a single room, but they had rented the double room to their friend Francesca from Brazil, so they only had the single room left to let.

They were such nice people! The thought of living in a nice family home with friendly flatmates was much much more appealing than living in a messy small house with 4 other college students. They were so nice that I said I'd move in with them on Sunday and they were ecstatic to have me move in. So I emailed the Arab girl back and told her I wasn't going to rent the room from her. She emailed me back on Thursday saying that she hoped I was still coming, but she hadn't been able to talk to her landlord yet. I sent another email back explaining what had happened, and I haven't heard from her since. So I think I probably avoided a big set of problems not moving in there.

The family here is so nice. My room is clean and neat. I did have to buy sheets, pillows, and a quilt cover, and there's no dryer here so I have to hang things up. But the environment seems much nicer. Isabella, the wife, was even nice enough to bake me a cake for my birthday. The day after my birthday I added them all as Facebook friends (because they asked to be) and they found out I had moved in on my birthday but hadn't said anything. She felt that they should really do something, so she baked me a nice chocolate cake with coconut which was very tasty.



So here's a picture of the house I live in. My room is the top left window. It's small but I have a lock so I can leave my stuff in there without having to worry too much.



These are just a few pictures of the area around the place I'm living now. It's really quite a nice little valley with lots of greenery all around. And there's a double decker bus that stops right at our front door that takes me all the way to work. So it seems that everything turned out all right in the end.



A little elementary school down the hill from my place.



A picture of the street I live on.



A picture of the park down the hill from my house.