By the end of these two years abroad, I think Skye and I could qualify to work on House Hunters International!
This apartment stuff is exhausting. Let me take you back to June. We were still in Germany and had officially accepted the Mosse grant to Israel. We were thrilled to be getting a significantly larger stipend. We had celebratory thoughts and daydreams about saving so much money! Building back the savings we had slowly been depleting for travel and life itself in Europe. It was almost as if we could let go of our constant daily stress about money! Could it be....we could buy a new pair of jeans without the free heart attack? LUXURY!
It only took one visit to the Jerusalem/English apartment site to crush those dreams. Average rents were over 1000$ per month. After more searching on that site and asking our Jerusalem connections about it, we realized that even with that, we'd be getting a tiny tiny and possibly hole in the wall place. Not only that but we were told over and over that you really can't find things ahead of time. We would have to wait until we arrived to secure an apartment. I guess it's sort of the way we buy cars in the states. You have to go to the lots and look at them, and buy it that day if you want it, otherwise, someone else may get it. But it seems as though apartments go off the market much faster than cars! We kept a watch on the apartment site, but we accepted that we would have to wait until we were physically in Jerusalem before finding one.
A previous Mosse student gave us the information of his apartment agent, Matan. We had been in contact with him since the middle of the summer as well. Almost every apartment listing has an agent who is different than the owner/landlord. Basically like a realtor but they deal with apartment rentals. Their fee is normally one month's rent + a 17% VAT tax. We thought this was kind outrageous, but found it was pretty standard.
Our friend was able to secure an apartment about one week before she left, so we did begin to do some serious searching a week before. I found a couple listings I loved and tried many times to call the agent, Meir, but he would never answer. Finally I woke up at 5am (1pm Jerusalem time) and he answered. I asked if it was still available and I would send a friend to check the place out. His English was great, but he sounded very annoyed and told me he couldn't tell me anything and just to call him when we arrived. I even told him about the friend who could check it out. He was a bit cold and rushed off the phone. I was pretty annoyed. I then wanted to call him 800 times at 5am his time, but I didn't.
We arrived on Tuesday evening and had an appointment set up with Matan on Wednesday morning to check out some listings. I even tried calling Meir the next day, but guess what....no answer. Shocker.
Our budget was about 4800NIS including the automatic arona taxes (on all apartments) and including utilities and internet.
Matan showed us 6 different apartments:
Apartment #1:
far away from campus, far away from Nachlaot (the neighborhood we wanted, near the market and where some of our friends live). Great size, two bedrooms, tv, balcony, full kitchen, ac, nice place. 5500NIS including everything but electricity (pretty standard to exclude elec)
Apartment #2: across the hall from #1. Tiny, studio, creepy bed thing, mini fridge, non functional bathroom, no oven, no stove. 3800NIS including everything but elec
Apartment #3: Closer to Nachlaot, but still kind of far. BRAND new building. Very nice features, but so freaking freaking tiny it didn't matter at all. boring balcony, no space for desk. included NOTHING, except some extra neighborhood tax that wasn't normal. 5000NIS
Apartment #4: In Nachlaot, on busy busy busy street and first floor. Disgusting mattress. bars on windows, loud. small. Didn't even ask the price, we weren't gonna live there no matter what.
Apartment #5: In Nachlaot. Entry way looked nice, stairs looked nice. Apartment, stupid. walk into tiny kitchen (if you could breath from the extremely potent bug bomb. Take one step to the right, go on the mediocre balcony and check out the breath taking view of...the neighboring shabby building. take a step to your left and you're in the living room...living on a wooden chair? because that's literally all that would fit in that space. One step forward and you're in the bedroom, it had a double bed and an over-the-bed single bunk thingie. and that took up the entire room. Step to the left from the bedroom and you're in the bathroom, sanitize your hands if you turn the light on though, the wall is extremely brown and dirty. the bathroom...I don't remember it I must have blocked it. Didn't ask price for this one either.
Apartment #6: We stood around waiting and waiting and waiting for a short Jewish man with a GIANT beard to find the key for us. Meanwhile, his pack of 8000 children were very into our map and welcomed themselves into our space. Matan decided to show us the Shuk, or the giant outdoor market while they found the keys. We returned. No keys. Matan took us home. (interesting twist....little did we know this would be our apartment!)
And that was our first day of apartment shopping. A discouraging day. Skye was stressed, I didn't feel too bad yet as it had only been one day and I could still try to get a hold of Meir. He seemed to have all the good listings within our price range. Matan was super sweet and helpful, but his listings seemed to suck.
Thursday came. No luck with Meir answering. I guess he wasn't interested in our money. We went down the listings and just began calling EVERY agent whose listing looked somewhat doable. We called one lady, Alin, who had an apartment just down the street from Katherine for 4700. PERFECT! I called her, and though her English was barely decipherable, I managed to set up a meeting with her to see this place. I should mention that while we were with Matan the day before, he stopped in to a real estate office to check for any other listings. No luck. Well, when we met Alin it happened to be in the very same office. We felt like dirty cheaters. But we were desperate! She showed us the place. It was so nice! But...empty. It wasn't furnished. They did offer us a solution though, go buy some. Sweet, that's helpful. We sat in the office again while Alin searched for other options. The ex pat who also worked there, who happened to be a bit obnoxious kept telling us how hard it was to find a furnished place in that budget. Alin took us to this other apartment, around the corner from Katherines. The entry way was beautiful, the stairway was beautiful, and this nice old french couple were currently living there. It was two bedrooms, had a living room, a gorgeous balcony with a fantastic view, 2 bathrooms and a large full kitchen. It was perfect. We wanted it. I wanted to move in immediately. But....5000NIS. Not including ANYTHING. We're getting to the point here where we're sacrificing groceries for a decent apartment. We left and headed back to the hotel.
I can't remember ever feeling more angry and more stuck. Skye kept reminding me that it would be ok, we would find something. Well, yes, this was true. We would find something. But it would HAVE to be one of the crap-shoot apartments we had looked at the day before or else we would be starving. I couldn't seem to shake the anger and the feeling of being trapped. It's like dealing with the airlines, they have complete and utter control of you (if you don't want to get arrested) and they can raise their prices to rape your bank account because you don't have any other option.
Luckily dinner with the Hummels was that night, which distracted me from my anger. And they were able to offer some encouragement about the housing situation. I declared that night, that I would keep calling Meir until he answered because at this point I could care less about being rude. Manners have very different forms here than the states.
Friday morning arrived. I called Meir 3 times before he actually answered, and was not nice. But this method was quite effective. It was the Sabbath though, and he promised to call on Sunday, not only did he say he would call on Sunday, but he also told me to call him. Considering his track record, I planned to just call him.
After that phone call, Matan picked us up, before noon of course, to show us the apartment with the lost keys. I guess they had found them. We also had an appointment with Frank, the Hummel's landlord to see an available apartment in their building. Both in Nachlaot.
The apartment with the missing key: Skye instantly fell in love. I thought it was alright, and a better option than everything else we had been seeing. But I certainly wasn't in love. The entire place was the size of my mom's kitchen. However it did have quite the fantastic balcony and view. We decided this would work if Meir and Frank didn't have anything better to show us. 4800NIS including everything but elec. And they would bring a couch up. We left feeling pretty good. Knowing that no matter what happened with these other apartments, we wouldn't be homeless, we'd take this one.
Franks place was...pretty nice but way overpriced. 5200NIS not including anything, except some other added expenses.
Sunday finally arrived and I called Meir. He answered the phone immediately by saying, "Janna?" I responded. He was really excited because apparently he was literally just trying to call me and we were calling each other at the same time. We set up an appointment to look at a couple places at noon, after church.
The first place we looked at was half underground, 2 bedrooms, and a shared outdoor space with the owners. The refrigerator was in the hallway. 4900NIS I can't remember what was included.
He took us to this other building where a woman named Esther decided to pretend she was also our agent and became quite concerned with what we wanted and was rather nosy about it. I think she was an American ex pat. Kind of obnoxious. Oh, and btw, Meir was born and grew up in LA but has been living here since he was a teenager. No wonder his English was so good.
Well, we couldn't get into those apartments right away, the owner was in a meeting and said we had to wait 20 minutes. Meir took us to see one other apartment in the meantime, but remembered we could only do furnished and those weren't even furnished, so we didn't bother looking at them at all. The last one he showed us was his business partner's place, and happened to be his building, he lived right above it. By this point we shared a moment with him, a good laugh about crazy Esther and how that wasn't the way this worked. She was nuts. He seemed to like us, and as soon as he mentioned he was married, I instantly wanted to be couple friends with them. This apartment was PERFECT! One bedroom, ok balcony, full kitchen, fully furnished, nice bathroom, awesome landlords. He took us to his business parther, Idan and his dad who own the building. We talked some prices, and they offered us food and drinks which was the first time that had happened! Oh, and...we sort of ran into Alin there....ugh we're so dirty---such agent sluts! This guy was asking us to be his neighbor, we felt like he really liked us. 4500NIS including everything but utilities and elec.
This was both good and bad. We now couldn't decide between the key-less apartment and this apartment. We walked the 2 miles back to the hotel and discussed it the whole way home. We got home, and called our families to talk it out with them. The differences came down to this: one had a lot of natural lighting and a nice balcony, the other had more space and seemed more functional. It was coming down to the wire so closely that I called Meir to ask if we could have a desk for Skye, and that almost made the difference. He pretty much laughed and said if that was the reason why we were hesitant than he would do whatever it took to get a desk in there. He said we could have the desk from his office because he was thinking about getting a new one. And then he proceeded to...nearly beg me and persuade us to go with them. I couldn't even get off the phone with him. WELL, MEIR, YOU SHOULD HAVE ANSWERED YOUR PHONE A WEEK AGO AND THERE WOULD BE NO QUESTION!!!!
So, we were supposed to be signing the lease for the key-less apartment at 4 30 with Matan and the owner. We were agonizing over this decision and going back and forth. But hey, this was a better problem to have than 2 days before when we were looking into living in refrigerator boxes.
We called Matan to let him know what was going on, we felt kind of bad for cheating on him with 2 other agents. We told him we were leaning toward the other apartment and may not be signing the lease. He sounded super upset and told us just to come anyways and we would talk about it then. We decided we would take a look at the place a second time, see if anything we said needed to be fixed was fixed, and we would go from there. Matan was late. The owner let us in, we walked around, and it was an instant NO. We knew. We wern't taking the key-less apartment. We hesitated, but told the owner we liked the other one better. He tried to talk us into staying or looking at a different place, but it wasn't tempting at all. So we walked away. Matan showed up and caught us right before we left the gate. We apologized and thanked him for being great, but the other place would just work better. He wouldn't let us leave. He said, "ok, give me 5 minutes, how low do we have to go to make you stay?" So I shot low (in hindsight, not low enough) and said, "4300NIS including EVERYTHING, including him buying us all the dishes, linens and towels, and getting us a couch that folds into a bed." and I told him we weren't waiting long, we didn't have time, and we really would leave if he wasn't back in 5 minutes. He came back in about 4 minutes and the landlord accepted and offered 4250NIS with all our requests that would be added to the contract. This was much lower than we had ever imagined being able to pay. If only we knew they were so cut-throat about it. We could have been jacking around the agents (well, the owners, throught he agents) more for lower prices!
Well, you guys remember our hopes and dreams of being able to save money again and not be stressed about needing to buy something? At this rent price, that dream seemed to be more attainable. So in the interest of our savings account, we took the keyless apartment. Signed a lease, and headed to Meir's office to tell him the bad news.
Fun times.
Stay tuned for apartment pictures! I'm waiting for my couch and a couple other things before we're settled!
(September 23rd, 2013)
Finally, only one year late, here are the apartment pictures!!!! Enjoy!
This apartment stuff is exhausting. Let me take you back to June. We were still in Germany and had officially accepted the Mosse grant to Israel. We were thrilled to be getting a significantly larger stipend. We had celebratory thoughts and daydreams about saving so much money! Building back the savings we had slowly been depleting for travel and life itself in Europe. It was almost as if we could let go of our constant daily stress about money! Could it be....we could buy a new pair of jeans without the free heart attack? LUXURY!
It only took one visit to the Jerusalem/English apartment site to crush those dreams. Average rents were over 1000$ per month. After more searching on that site and asking our Jerusalem connections about it, we realized that even with that, we'd be getting a tiny tiny and possibly hole in the wall place. Not only that but we were told over and over that you really can't find things ahead of time. We would have to wait until we arrived to secure an apartment. I guess it's sort of the way we buy cars in the states. You have to go to the lots and look at them, and buy it that day if you want it, otherwise, someone else may get it. But it seems as though apartments go off the market much faster than cars! We kept a watch on the apartment site, but we accepted that we would have to wait until we were physically in Jerusalem before finding one.
A previous Mosse student gave us the information of his apartment agent, Matan. We had been in contact with him since the middle of the summer as well. Almost every apartment listing has an agent who is different than the owner/landlord. Basically like a realtor but they deal with apartment rentals. Their fee is normally one month's rent + a 17% VAT tax. We thought this was kind outrageous, but found it was pretty standard.
Our friend was able to secure an apartment about one week before she left, so we did begin to do some serious searching a week before. I found a couple listings I loved and tried many times to call the agent, Meir, but he would never answer. Finally I woke up at 5am (1pm Jerusalem time) and he answered. I asked if it was still available and I would send a friend to check the place out. His English was great, but he sounded very annoyed and told me he couldn't tell me anything and just to call him when we arrived. I even told him about the friend who could check it out. He was a bit cold and rushed off the phone. I was pretty annoyed. I then wanted to call him 800 times at 5am his time, but I didn't.
We arrived on Tuesday evening and had an appointment set up with Matan on Wednesday morning to check out some listings. I even tried calling Meir the next day, but guess what....no answer. Shocker.
Our budget was about 4800NIS including the automatic arona taxes (on all apartments) and including utilities and internet.
Matan showed us 6 different apartments:
Apartment #1:
far away from campus, far away from Nachlaot (the neighborhood we wanted, near the market and where some of our friends live). Great size, two bedrooms, tv, balcony, full kitchen, ac, nice place. 5500NIS including everything but electricity (pretty standard to exclude elec)
Apartment #2: across the hall from #1. Tiny, studio, creepy bed thing, mini fridge, non functional bathroom, no oven, no stove. 3800NIS including everything but elec
Apartment #3: Closer to Nachlaot, but still kind of far. BRAND new building. Very nice features, but so freaking freaking tiny it didn't matter at all. boring balcony, no space for desk. included NOTHING, except some extra neighborhood tax that wasn't normal. 5000NIS
Apartment #4: In Nachlaot, on busy busy busy street and first floor. Disgusting mattress. bars on windows, loud. small. Didn't even ask the price, we weren't gonna live there no matter what.
Apartment #5: In Nachlaot. Entry way looked nice, stairs looked nice. Apartment, stupid. walk into tiny kitchen (if you could breath from the extremely potent bug bomb. Take one step to the right, go on the mediocre balcony and check out the breath taking view of...the neighboring shabby building. take a step to your left and you're in the living room...living on a wooden chair? because that's literally all that would fit in that space. One step forward and you're in the bedroom, it had a double bed and an over-the-bed single bunk thingie. and that took up the entire room. Step to the left from the bedroom and you're in the bathroom, sanitize your hands if you turn the light on though, the wall is extremely brown and dirty. the bathroom...I don't remember it I must have blocked it. Didn't ask price for this one either.
Apartment #6: We stood around waiting and waiting and waiting for a short Jewish man with a GIANT beard to find the key for us. Meanwhile, his pack of 8000 children were very into our map and welcomed themselves into our space. Matan decided to show us the Shuk, or the giant outdoor market while they found the keys. We returned. No keys. Matan took us home. (interesting twist....little did we know this would be our apartment!)
And that was our first day of apartment shopping. A discouraging day. Skye was stressed, I didn't feel too bad yet as it had only been one day and I could still try to get a hold of Meir. He seemed to have all the good listings within our price range. Matan was super sweet and helpful, but his listings seemed to suck.
Thursday came. No luck with Meir answering. I guess he wasn't interested in our money. We went down the listings and just began calling EVERY agent whose listing looked somewhat doable. We called one lady, Alin, who had an apartment just down the street from Katherine for 4700. PERFECT! I called her, and though her English was barely decipherable, I managed to set up a meeting with her to see this place. I should mention that while we were with Matan the day before, he stopped in to a real estate office to check for any other listings. No luck. Well, when we met Alin it happened to be in the very same office. We felt like dirty cheaters. But we were desperate! She showed us the place. It was so nice! But...empty. It wasn't furnished. They did offer us a solution though, go buy some. Sweet, that's helpful. We sat in the office again while Alin searched for other options. The ex pat who also worked there, who happened to be a bit obnoxious kept telling us how hard it was to find a furnished place in that budget. Alin took us to this other apartment, around the corner from Katherines. The entry way was beautiful, the stairway was beautiful, and this nice old french couple were currently living there. It was two bedrooms, had a living room, a gorgeous balcony with a fantastic view, 2 bathrooms and a large full kitchen. It was perfect. We wanted it. I wanted to move in immediately. But....5000NIS. Not including ANYTHING. We're getting to the point here where we're sacrificing groceries for a decent apartment. We left and headed back to the hotel.
I can't remember ever feeling more angry and more stuck. Skye kept reminding me that it would be ok, we would find something. Well, yes, this was true. We would find something. But it would HAVE to be one of the crap-shoot apartments we had looked at the day before or else we would be starving. I couldn't seem to shake the anger and the feeling of being trapped. It's like dealing with the airlines, they have complete and utter control of you (if you don't want to get arrested) and they can raise their prices to rape your bank account because you don't have any other option.
Luckily dinner with the Hummels was that night, which distracted me from my anger. And they were able to offer some encouragement about the housing situation. I declared that night, that I would keep calling Meir until he answered because at this point I could care less about being rude. Manners have very different forms here than the states.
Friday morning arrived. I called Meir 3 times before he actually answered, and was not nice. But this method was quite effective. It was the Sabbath though, and he promised to call on Sunday, not only did he say he would call on Sunday, but he also told me to call him. Considering his track record, I planned to just call him.
After that phone call, Matan picked us up, before noon of course, to show us the apartment with the lost keys. I guess they had found them. We also had an appointment with Frank, the Hummel's landlord to see an available apartment in their building. Both in Nachlaot.
The apartment with the missing key: Skye instantly fell in love. I thought it was alright, and a better option than everything else we had been seeing. But I certainly wasn't in love. The entire place was the size of my mom's kitchen. However it did have quite the fantastic balcony and view. We decided this would work if Meir and Frank didn't have anything better to show us. 4800NIS including everything but elec. And they would bring a couch up. We left feeling pretty good. Knowing that no matter what happened with these other apartments, we wouldn't be homeless, we'd take this one.
Franks place was...pretty nice but way overpriced. 5200NIS not including anything, except some other added expenses.
Sunday finally arrived and I called Meir. He answered the phone immediately by saying, "Janna?" I responded. He was really excited because apparently he was literally just trying to call me and we were calling each other at the same time. We set up an appointment to look at a couple places at noon, after church.
The first place we looked at was half underground, 2 bedrooms, and a shared outdoor space with the owners. The refrigerator was in the hallway. 4900NIS I can't remember what was included.
He took us to this other building where a woman named Esther decided to pretend she was also our agent and became quite concerned with what we wanted and was rather nosy about it. I think she was an American ex pat. Kind of obnoxious. Oh, and btw, Meir was born and grew up in LA but has been living here since he was a teenager. No wonder his English was so good.
Well, we couldn't get into those apartments right away, the owner was in a meeting and said we had to wait 20 minutes. Meir took us to see one other apartment in the meantime, but remembered we could only do furnished and those weren't even furnished, so we didn't bother looking at them at all. The last one he showed us was his business partner's place, and happened to be his building, he lived right above it. By this point we shared a moment with him, a good laugh about crazy Esther and how that wasn't the way this worked. She was nuts. He seemed to like us, and as soon as he mentioned he was married, I instantly wanted to be couple friends with them. This apartment was PERFECT! One bedroom, ok balcony, full kitchen, fully furnished, nice bathroom, awesome landlords. He took us to his business parther, Idan and his dad who own the building. We talked some prices, and they offered us food and drinks which was the first time that had happened! Oh, and...we sort of ran into Alin there....ugh we're so dirty---such agent sluts! This guy was asking us to be his neighbor, we felt like he really liked us. 4500NIS including everything but utilities and elec.
This was both good and bad. We now couldn't decide between the key-less apartment and this apartment. We walked the 2 miles back to the hotel and discussed it the whole way home. We got home, and called our families to talk it out with them. The differences came down to this: one had a lot of natural lighting and a nice balcony, the other had more space and seemed more functional. It was coming down to the wire so closely that I called Meir to ask if we could have a desk for Skye, and that almost made the difference. He pretty much laughed and said if that was the reason why we were hesitant than he would do whatever it took to get a desk in there. He said we could have the desk from his office because he was thinking about getting a new one. And then he proceeded to...nearly beg me and persuade us to go with them. I couldn't even get off the phone with him. WELL, MEIR, YOU SHOULD HAVE ANSWERED YOUR PHONE A WEEK AGO AND THERE WOULD BE NO QUESTION!!!!
So, we were supposed to be signing the lease for the key-less apartment at 4 30 with Matan and the owner. We were agonizing over this decision and going back and forth. But hey, this was a better problem to have than 2 days before when we were looking into living in refrigerator boxes.
We called Matan to let him know what was going on, we felt kind of bad for cheating on him with 2 other agents. We told him we were leaning toward the other apartment and may not be signing the lease. He sounded super upset and told us just to come anyways and we would talk about it then. We decided we would take a look at the place a second time, see if anything we said needed to be fixed was fixed, and we would go from there. Matan was late. The owner let us in, we walked around, and it was an instant NO. We knew. We wern't taking the key-less apartment. We hesitated, but told the owner we liked the other one better. He tried to talk us into staying or looking at a different place, but it wasn't tempting at all. So we walked away. Matan showed up and caught us right before we left the gate. We apologized and thanked him for being great, but the other place would just work better. He wouldn't let us leave. He said, "ok, give me 5 minutes, how low do we have to go to make you stay?" So I shot low (in hindsight, not low enough) and said, "4300NIS including EVERYTHING, including him buying us all the dishes, linens and towels, and getting us a couch that folds into a bed." and I told him we weren't waiting long, we didn't have time, and we really would leave if he wasn't back in 5 minutes. He came back in about 4 minutes and the landlord accepted and offered 4250NIS with all our requests that would be added to the contract. This was much lower than we had ever imagined being able to pay. If only we knew they were so cut-throat about it. We could have been jacking around the agents (well, the owners, throught he agents) more for lower prices!
Well, you guys remember our hopes and dreams of being able to save money again and not be stressed about needing to buy something? At this rent price, that dream seemed to be more attainable. So in the interest of our savings account, we took the keyless apartment. Signed a lease, and headed to Meir's office to tell him the bad news.
Fun times.
Stay tuned for apartment pictures! I'm waiting for my couch and a couple other things before we're settled!
(September 23rd, 2013)
Finally, only one year late, here are the apartment pictures!!!! Enjoy!
 |
| View from the front door |
 |
| View from the kitchen |
 |
| View from the "dining room" |
 |
| Kitchen close up |
 |
| View from the balcony |
 |
| Balcony door |
 |
| Our washer on the balcony |
 |
| View from the balcony (knesset in the background) |
 |
| Other view from our balcony |
 |
| Bedroom |
 |
| Other side of bedroom |
 |
| The closet |
 |
| The bathroom |
Wow. It seems so glamorous to us for you to live in Jerusalem, but glamorous is NOT the right word, is it?
ReplyDelete