Let the Nesting Begin! We Have a Home!!

At last! A home! A bed! Of our own!

Intellectually, I know this means a huge weight is lifted… however the past week+  of anxiety and transient living have left us in a lingering state of numbness verging on general homicidal feelings towards the world. However, our very own apartment is proving to be a great antidote to the soul crushing process of apartment hunting in Bologna!

The place is on Via Parigi (Paris Street), just half a block away from one of our favorite cafès. It’s on the 3rd and top floor of the building, which is easy to spot because it’s painted yellow with green shutters on the windows. Since it’s in the Center of the city, it has a pretty quirky layout (basically, the front door opens into Anna’s bedroom, which leads into my bedroom, which leads into the kitchen- which has exposed roof beams!!- which leads into the bathroom. More on the bathroom in a moment). I choose to think of this as charming and distinctive (like the low doorways and bathroom ceiling I bump my head into when wearing high heels), rather than inconvenient. It was the last apartment we looked at on Tuesday after a long and soul-crushing day of searching on Monday (oh yeah, and the weeks before), at the end of which we were beginning to think that we would be living on Tiffany’s floor forever (though Tiffany, magnanamous as she is, might have had something to say about that…). We were  going to take an apartment we had iffy feelings about (the one inhabited by six men), but decided to look at this place because it was well located and central (though only about 45 square meters… pretty small). As we walked over, Anna was attempting to raise morale about the place. My soul hadn’t yet had enough coffee to recover from the previous day, so I was fairly silent, but tried to throw in an encouraging vowel sound every now and then. We knew the location would be good, and we met the landlord there and were immediately comforted (friendly! Smiley! Laughing! A vet! Laid-back! Not the Slumlord of Bologna with his son/ The Artful Dodger in tow!). We started up the stairs and when we reached the top I groaned to myself upon seeing a spray pianted door “Of course. Another place that’s totally falling apart. What a waste of time. Oh well.” And then, joy of  joys! He unlocked the other door! The solid and clean door! And the apartment was so cute! I was already setting up floor plans in my head when we got to the kitchen with it’s charming sloping ceiling, washing machine (luxury!), and EXPOSED ROOF BEAMS (my real estate catnip, turns out). Anna was investigating the bathroom, and I stuck my head over her shoulder (Bathroom! Even MORE sloping ceiling, enclosed and WELL-ENAMELED BATHTUB, with a skylight!) and whispered frantically, “Anna! Can we do this? Can we make this work? It’s tiny, but can we make it work?!” We had already committed to revisit the other possibility (6-men-in-a-two-room-place) that evening, so we shook hands with the landlord and told him we would call him. Which we did. That evening. We sent him our information, and signed the contract last night. He handed over the keys, and we moved most of our stuff there! We were pretty thrilled to have our own beds (and to let Tiffany back in her place), and then I went to refill a water bottle… and no water came out of the sink. Dark dark dark day. It appeared that, since the place had been uninhabited for a while, the water contract had expired. So we spent last night and this afternoon without water (well, we walked about a half mile at almost midnight last night to buy a six pack of 2 liter bottles so we could, you know, clean ourselves). However, this afternoon, after retrieving the rest of our belongings from Tiffany’s place, Riccardo (so useful!) figured out how to turn on the water- what joy! So the gas is still off, leaving me with a cold shower (but a shower!) during which I discovered that the odd thumping and tapping noises from the bathroom roof are not from a neighbor, but instead from a group of pigeons who live on the roof and occasionally tap dance across the window… this continues to amuse me to no end.

So! We’ve reached the end of one saga, of course leaving room for the next one to begin, but until then, we’re consulting the Ikea catalog like it’s some holy book and are relishing having an address. So come visit us in Bologna! We have a place for you!

OK. Now this is getting ridiculous.

Good news: Anna and I have jobs! We’ll be working at Anglo-American starting next week with a new teachers’ meeting. 

Bad news: Because we are not technically, shall we say, legal, the school is reluctant to put on paper that we work for them… which is perfectly understandable, but not particularly helpful when you are trying to rent an apartment from an agency which requests such documentation… 

Some bureaucratic context- in Italy, the most powerful and well paying job is not that of a doctor, lawyer, or even politician (though they do alright too…), it is that of the Notaio- the notary. Yes. The notary- wielding that embossed stamp is a pretty sweet deal over here, and that gives you perhaps some idea about the influence of red tape… if you can throw some paper at a situation, all the better. Which, again, is fine and dandy, unless you yourself lack papers. Oops. 

So what does this mean for Anna and me? Well, remember that apartment I mentioned, the one we love love LOVED? Rented through an agency (pardon me while I shake my fist at the heavens to no great effect). Fortunately for us, the female agent seems sympathetic to our cause and has promised to try to arrange a meeting with the owner of the property so we can maybe work something out. This means that we have essentially two possible outcomes. A) We are able to meet with the proprietario of this apartment, reassure him that, yes, we are American girls and might appear transient, but hey! Call our job and they’ll tell you (verbally!) that we are going to be paid steadily, or call our old land lady who can tell you that we paid on time and in full every month… plus, aren’t we charming and nice? Don’t you want us to live in your property? Or option B) We heave a deep sigh of resignation and despair (not the first or last in this process, I assure you), and continue to beat the pavement to rent privately without an agent involved. We’ve already seen several properties and met enough characters to stock a VERY entertaining novel. A brief survey:

•  The Croatian tenant who showed us the apartment (on the top floor… about 6 or 7 flights of stairs up.), carefully pointing out every flaw in each room and ending with some kind advice along the lines of “If my daughter were looking at this place, I’d tell her NOT TO TAKE IT.” Oh. Did I mention we visited it during a Monsoon? 
• Veronese, the battle axe proprietaria who gave us the biggest guilt trip of our lives (well, more for Anna than for me since I was only understanding about 60% of the proceedings) for a) not taking the apartment we looked at and b) telling her that, since we would be working for a school, we would not be able to au pair for the approximately 8.5 billion people she had promised us to…
• The tenants of what could be a very charming apartment for Anna and me… once the six men living there move out. On the plus side, the landlady clearly had no problem with non-Italian tenants, so THAT’S in our favor…

At least three more appointments on Monday… here’s hoping something pans out so that Tiffany can have her apartment back soon!

In Which Natalie and Anna are Still Homeless, but Thankful for the Kindness of Friends (and Strangers)…

Ok! Another very rambling update (I know! Two in a row! Don’t get too used to it, but a lot has happened in the last 24 or so hours!)…

So! Remember that apartment with the super sweet location that Anna and I were jazzed about yesterday? Turns out, the landlady did not particularly want foreigners living there, but instead of just saying “No thanks” to our offer, decided that the best way to do things was to give an impossible list of demands (a small sampling: an additional month’s rent as a deposit- which we may or may not get back (read, likely would not), 6 month’s rent up front (seriously?!), or our pancreas plated in gold. Ok. Kidding about the last one, but not the rest). I’m pretty sure, at this point, that if passive-aggressiveness was not invented by late-middle aged Italian women, they are certainly the keepers of its flame. So essentially, we walked away from that situation today, but with lighter hearts than yesterday because TIFFANY IS A SAINT. “Who is this Tiffany, besides a Saint?” you ask? She taught with Julia at the Anglo-American school and has befriended us and, upon hearing that we were facing further hemorraghing cash to stay in a hotel while we continue the apartment hunt, insisted that we stay in her apartment. Her apartment which is conveniently rented from her boss, Mary, founder of the Anglo-American school. Her boss who popped by to tell us that we should come by for an interview today. So after swiftly moving out of our last place and finding a (friendly!) taxi driver to take all our stuff to Tiffany’s place, we went to the realtor (happily with Riccardo in tow- we’re dragooning him into our future real estate endevors to loom in the background and decipher incomprehensible Bologanese accents. He’s very helpful in those and many other respects! We owe him organ donation/ first born children/ our souls in payment!), walked away with our initial deposit on the Santo Stefano place, and went to mull over lunch.

To skip much of the day (which really passed in a blur- but we got our CVs printed, had AMAZING ice cream, made Anna make phone calls (which she hates) to get apointments to see apartments, had a great interview at Anglo-American), we went to see an apartment a block away from the apartment/hotel we had been staying in (awesome location, near Malphigi). The location was enough to sell us, but as we climbed up the (several) stairs and finally into the apartment we fell in love. Actually, in LOVE love. This apartment may be The One…  It has a couple drawbacks (ie: you have to go through a bedroom to get to the bathroom… but hey! We’re friends!), but it’s beautiful, well furnished, COZY, has a skylight, exposed roof beams, and is basically fantastic. We’re going to look around a little tomorrow, but unless we find something even better, this is it! We hope!

Homeless! An update…

Weeeeelllll… we moved out of our apartment on Sunday (grand trials and tribulations, during which I learned that I react to absolutely ridiculous situations, such as facing homelessness in Italy, with hysterical, uncontrolable, and relentless laughter. Good to know.). We’ve been staying in a nice long-term apartment-hotel-ish place (nice, has a kitchen so we can cook our own food), and have been searching for housing. We believe <knocking wood furiously> that we’ve found a place on Santo Stefano (killer location), and we made an offer yesterday through the real estate agency, so now we wait for the proprietaria (the landlady) to decide whether or not to take our offer and let us move in (she has until the end of the week to do so… and since we have yet to hear from her after 24 hours, we are anxious. Very very anxious). Unfortunately, even if our offer is accepted, they are doing work on the place (which it kinda needs- it’s a bit of a hole in the wall, but a very cozy one!), and we wouldn’t be able to move in until the 10th of September at the earliest. For those of you keeping score at home, that means 2 weeks in a hotel… let that sink in along with all the implications. So here we are in the internet cafe, hedging our bets and hitting the internet looking for other apartments… just in case.

In other news, Anna and I are considering homicide in passing if some of our friends here continue to talk about moving to Rome (as we have just decided to plunk down in Bologna for a while…). Seriously folks?  On the plus side, what a great excuse to visit Rome!

So yes, this leaves us in a bit of a fluxy place… on the one hand, we may have landed a super sweet place… on the other, we may be homeless for a while… anybody have a place for two in Bologna?