EuroLife: Day 48

Welcome to our humble home. This our foyer, our entryway, our vestibule, our antechamber, our lobby. This is where we hang our coats. This is where we put our shoes.

I realize we never told the story of how we found this place, so I thought I'd give it a try. Before coming to Jena, we spent hours looking at apartments online. There were over a hundred to choose from, so we spent time learning about the different parts of town where they were located, considering what price would realistically fit into our budget, and making hard choices between the apartment with the bathtub and the apartment with a larger kitchen. After much discussion, we found the perfect apartment. Below you can see one of the pictures that finally swayed us. We liked all the windows, and we liked the location. We sent an email to the person who was offering the apartment. Just to be safe, we also sent an email to four or five other people about the apartments they had listed. We weren't that worried though, since the apartment we really wanted had been on the market since July.



On our second day in town we searched for an internet cafe to see if we had heard back about our dream apartment. Strangely enough, we hadn't received any emails. So we wrote down the numbers for four or five apartments, and headed for a pay phone.

Many phone calls and coins later, we hadn't reached anyone. We'd only reached answering machines. Since we didn't have a local number, we couldn't leave messages. We went to buy a pay-as-you go cell phone. At first they wouldn't let us buy one without a local address. Finally, they accepted the address of our pension as our local address. We made more calls, and left messages.

I should say that at this point we where anxious to find an apartment as soon as possible. Most of the pensions were full, and we were staying at a relatively expensive one outside of town. Eating meals out and traveling back and forth by from our pension to town by bus, we were going through money pretty quickly.

Finally, we got in touch with a few people, all of whom told us the apartment they had advertised was already rented. Finally, we talked to the people renting our dream apartment, and it, too, had already been rented "for a long time now," as I was told on the phone. (Incidentally, it is still being advertised on the sight now, where I found the picture for this post.)

The next day, we were at the "Mail Boxes Etc," the only place in town where we could check email and use the internet for about $8 dollars an hour. We found an apartment that had been listed one hour before we saw it. The list had pictures which looked good. Excited, we called the people and made an appointment for that afternoon. As we walked to the apartment, we felt that we should take it as long as it was decent. Dolores didn't love the part of town. It was near the west train station, and as Dolores said later, it felt like East Germany. The buildings were somewhat drab, and many where covered with graffiti. Still, I tried to put a positive face on it. The pictures had been beautiful -- big windows, light rooms.

We looked at the apartment and we liked it. But then, as we were talking with the owners, someone else came to the door to look at the apartment. Apparently, six people had already called to look at the apartment in the four hours since they had posted the ad. About the same time we learned that we would have to buy a kitchen. We were starting to panic. We put down our information on a form, and they said they a would make a decision about who to rent the apartment to and get back to us.

It was then that we got the email that saved our life. One of the people, to whom we sent an email while still in the states, wrote to tell us that while she had already rented the apartment I had inquired about, she did have another one open that she hadn't listed yet. She hadn't listed it yet! No auditions to get the apartment! We made plans to see it the next day. Well, the rest is history, love at first sight. With its long hallways of wasted space, its oh so built in kitchen, and its Ikia furniture, we knew it would be our home.

We moved the next day on a Friday night, three days before the first of the month. If our landlady hadn't let us move in early, we might have had to sleep in the train station or take the train to another town with vacancies. After a wet, gray, cold day we might our landlady at dusk. She let us in, and we collapsed onto the bare bed. We sat in the chairs in front of our ten inch television set and watched TV like kings. And we said a prayer of thanksgiving. One of many.