Apartment Pics!

They're finally here- pics of my apartment! Let me give you the tour.

When you first walk in, the bathroom is straight ahead...

But if you take two steps to the right, you see the living room...

(notice how shiny my floor is!)

One morning I woke up and looked outside and saw...nothing. Completely foggy. Couldn't even see the ground (granted, I'm on the 18th floor...but still). See the nice, white "backdrop" outside the living room window? If only this was caused by a blizzard...

My tree again. I really like my tree, if you couldn't tell. Do you see the bright, sparkly star NEAR the top of the tree? Yeah, it's too heavy to go on top. If I put it on top, my tree does the Charlie Brown tree slouch. Very sad. So this year, I'm settling for a NEARLY-top-of-the-tree topper.

My beautiful candles... my tree has only red and gold decorations. No gold candles, so I went with red and white. Figured it was classy.

more candles...

Christmas packages!!! Can you see the tree "skirt"? Someone gave me 3 santa hats...so I put one over each "foot" of the tree stand. :)

Opening one box, but not opening the wrapped things.

More living room Christmas decorations...

My bedroom (if you're looking at the living room, my bedroom is off the left side of the LR).

My bedroom Christmas tree...

My guest bedroom, off the right side of the living room...

Behind the yellow curtains is a big corner window with a big windowsill. I want to eventually get big puffy pillows and some throw blankets and that'll be a little reading nook. :)

And finally, the kitchen...next to the guest bedroom. I'm not sure I like the see through cabinets, so I use cool looking gift bags to store things in. And I decided that I want each of my coffee cups to be one-of-a-kind, which is lots of fun. :)

At the end of the kitchen, on the left, there's a little laundry nook. The washer is there along with some shelves for laundry soap and stuff. It's great.

To give you an idea of what my apartment is really like, I think the owner did a lot of the decor shopping at IKEA. I find IKEA labels on a lot of things, and the other day I was at IKEA and kept seeing things that are in my apartment (like the bedroom curtains). I love it! :)

One of my friends, after visiting my apartment, said "your living room is so aesthetically pleasing. I just want to come over and look at your Christmas tree!" So if you can't tell, I LOVE my new apartment. I want to go home all the time! It's crazy to think about being in a place for an entire year- it's been so long since I've been so "permanent" anywhere. Feels good to unpack though.

Guests are welcome anytime! Come on over for a movie night! Some friends moved back to Australia and gave me tons of bedding, towels, dishes, etc. So I'm all set for visitors!

The Joy of Apartment Hunting...

...or lack, thereof.

I have been on a 6+ week hunt for "the perfect place" and I'd like to take you on this journey so you can share in my joy.

From November 8-15, I was enrolled in a Master's class here in the city. Since the end of August, I've been staying with a friend waiting for prices to come back down to near-normal after the Games. But I've got so much on my plate right now that I knew it would be best if I could move into my own place before the Master's class started. So about 2 weeks before the course, I began searching. Keep in mind that this entire "hunt" was not done in my first language (that just adds to the "joy").

Step 1- decide what part of the city I want to live in (I realize I may be doing things out of order, logically). There's a park not far from where Jordan and Sonya live that I recently fell in love with. It has almost NO foreigners and has the feel of a completely different city. It also has some really great indoor markets and local foods. The location is relatively convenient for both my teaching job and my work at the River, so I decided that was the "perfect" place to look for my "perfect" apartment. Begin Step 2...

Step 2- find available apartments in the "perfect" area of the city. A few friends recommended
some websites for me to search on and offered to help me look. So I enlisted the help of a few friends and began weeding through the places online.

A typical apartment hunting day went something like this: look online for at least an hour, come up with a list of possible places that have detailed descriptions. They match my criteria for size, price, location, and furnishings. We make a few phone calls and find out that most of them have already been rented, a handful are non-working numbers or no answer. We make an appointment to see the 3 or 4 that are left on the list. However, the apartment that we're taken to has NO comparisons to the description we read online and called specifically asking about...the agent shrugs it off and says "ok, you don't like this one...I'll take you to another one." I figure this is just a formality, so I go along with it...until we get to the third or fourth and I just turn around and walk back out the door. I go home feeling defeated, wanting to give up, and feeling like the agents are only out to make a commission (oh wait...they are only out to make a commission). My friends continue to look despite my defeated-ness and encourage me to not give up.

All of my spare time is spent repeating this process (most of the time is spent online). After a LOT of bad apartments, I decide that I won't go to a place until I see pictures first. However, most agents/owners somehow don't have pictures of the apartments-probably because they know no one would rent them if they did. But this request seems to make the agents that much more aggressive in their "tactics" to win me over.

Admittedly, I saw one place that was pretty big and nice, but it felt really far away. I later realized it wasn't as far away as I'd thought and I should have taken it.

Then one day, I went to see more apartments with another agent from yet another agency. We went into an apartment that was amazingly clean and decently sized, but the bathroom and kitchen were nasty. But the agent's response blew me away. He said "tell me what you don't like. Any little thing. Just say it." So I did. I expected the normal shrug-off, but instead he said "ok. No problem. Now I know what kind of place you're looking for." And I went home instead of being dragged to more places. A few days later I went back through the normal routine with another agent, and when I returned home that night, I asked my friend to call the nice agent back because if I had to deal with agents, I only wanted to deal with one who I felt would listen to me.

By the next morning, the agent had 3 places to take me to. When I walked in to each of them, I was instantly in love with them and wanted to cry (for joy). A few days later, I signed the contract for my apartment! It's not in a location I'd originally wanted to look, but it's a location that I really like a lot, so I'm happy to be there.

The owner of my new apartment had hoped that a single, foreign girl would rent her place because everything is new and she wants it taken well care of. So that explains why it hasn't been rented quickly like everything else! And she and I seem to have very similar tastes because I really like the way she has decorated the place...which makes it really easy to move in and feel at home!

Coming soon-pictures of my new, increasingly Christmas-y apartment! (battery died after two pictures and I can't seem to find the cord I need to download those two pics).