waiting…and apartment hunt October 26, 2007

is hard…but it can be bearable and even fun, if you put some effort in making it so…

i am waiting for my contract and work permit (more precisely). i got the job offer and i accepted it and now i have to wait. which is ok, because waiting doesn’t mean “will not happen” – it just means there are many procedures which take time.

the bad part about it is that i have to find an apartment in Zurich until the end of December. From what i heard from different people, and read on www.englishforum.ch (a very useful forum with a lot of information and helpful people, made by expats in CH for expats in CH), it is very very hard to find a place to live in Zurich.

So even if i didn’t have the work contract, i said i could use some “interview for apartment” rehearsals and i sent around 10-14 e-mails this Monday for some flats which seemed nice in the ads. I got 4 answers and the visits started. i saw the first one and the girl chose someone else. i saw the second one and the guy said he likes me, so i found a place to stay in 3 days…incredible…i should still have visited the other 2 places next week, but i just wrote back and said i already found something…

Overall it was a very very interesting experience and…i am looking forward to my next apartment hunt in 7 months from now )… so my waiting became fun and fruitful also…

Theoretically here only 5% of the apartments are on the “for rent” market, and there very many people looking for a flat, which makes the “apartment hunt” even harder for the foreigners…especially when you don’t have a work contract to prove you can pay the rent and when your German is not very great so the potential landlord looks very concentrated at your face during the entire conversation . For me this was just in theory and i guess i was really lucky…but the idea is that it is possible, and that “waiting” is not healthful, and it can be productive if you decide so…