The Apartment Search

I have a lot to catch up on as far as blogging about our adventures here.  Right now, though, I want to write about a different kind of adventure, the adventure that is our apartment search.  The housing market in this part of Switzerland is crazy.  There are many more people looking for apartments than there are apartments available.  That means that when we look at an apartment, we have to decide on the spot if we want to apply for it.  Usually, there is more than one person who applies for each apartment, so we just have to wait to see if the owners choose us.

I saw an apartment that I loved last week.  It was in a new building, so everything in the apartment was shiny and new and beautiful.  The location was great.  It was close to the train station, close to Gordon's office, and walking distance to grocery stores.  We applied for this apartment, but we haven't heard the answer yet.  We do know that there were other people who worked at Nestle who applied for this apartment before we did, so our chances are not good.

Today, we went out searching again.  Today was the first time Gordon was able to go with me on the "housing tour" as it's called here.  We saw 5 places and we loved one of them.  It's in an even better location than the place we saw last week and it's about 600 dollars less per month.  We are definitely putting in an application for this one and I really hope we get it.  If not, we will continue with our search.  The good news is that there are places in good locations that are not only affordable, but very nice.  I feel better after today's search than I have after any of the other times we had gone.

In other news, I bought my ticket yesterday for Claire and me to fly home in October.  We'll be there for FOUR whole weeks and we'll be home for Halloween!  Claire and I will fly to Washington to visit Gordon's mom while we're in the states.  As an added bonus, we'll get to see Roxy and Indy (our dogs) at Gordon's mom's house!