Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Honestly, I'm down like the economy (which is recovering, right?)

Ahhh it gets closer.

12 days until I leave for good ol' Vienna, still don't have a place to live! I've been sending out emails like crazy on all sorts of apartment websites. Craigslist proved terrible - I got the same scam email multiple times, and more people sending me ridiculously long emails describing their heroic deeds and their desperation for an apartment, ending with a request for a money order. bleh. Anyway, I think I've sent out over 100 requests and gotten... MAYBE 10 responses, none of which have worked out. But, I think I figured out some problems.

1. Germans don't know how to list their apartments. I think, 2-room apartment = 2 bedrooms. Wrong. It means 2 ROOMS, sometimes. Sometimes 4 rooms is a 3 bedroom apartment, however sometimes 4 is 2 bedrooms, etc. It's definitely hard to narrow it down.
2. The word "Zimmer" means room. Or, roomS. The difference is in a tiny little article, and in abbreviated ads they don't often use the articles. So, the word "Schlafzimmer" doesn't really help me understand how many bedrooms there are!
3. People with multiple apartments want to know what district/bezirk I want to live in. Turns out, flexibility is not desired, but I don't have a preference.
4. My German is not perfect, and neither is their English, so people just tend to avoid responding, since it's kind of a task...

Anyway, Jenni's dad might have found us one, without much effort at all. Goodness!

Life these days is interesting. Lots of changes, and I've been homeless for a while so these changes are closing in on me and making me crazy. There's already been a lot of hard goodbyes to things and people that I love. My time in Portland is almost done before I head off to Seattle to hang out with the fam for a bit. It will be nice to sleep in a bed, sleep (at all), eat regular meals, take regular showers... the works!

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