Apartment Hunting Day 3

At 2:00 on Thursday, I went to Nice House to meet with Anh, but learned upon arrival that he was not in and that we would have to reschedule for tomorrow. I returned back to the hotel and found that I had an email from Phuong, who I was supposed to meet with on Friday, asking if we could see the apartments that afternoon. I coordinated with Steven to meet her at 4:30 at her office and we were off.

At Phuong's office with met up with two other teachers from AIS and climbed into a cab for our first destination. As we pulled up in the neighborhood, Steven and I began to recognize our surroundings and soon found ourselves outside of the same high rise in District 4 we had been taken to on our first day. Because all of the apartments are individually owned, many trips to the same building can reveal very different apartments, but we had already decided against that particular building due to its location and sterility. We were again shown a beautiful apartment with a spectacular view, voiced our compliments and headed back down to the waiting taxi.

The second place we were shown was in District 1 in a more residential neighborhood in a converted hotel. The room was a studio apartment on the fourth floor (which sounds deceptively close to the ground, but which in Vietnam requires one to climb up eight flights of stairs). It was one big room furnished room with a bed, desk, armoire, kitchen (which included a fridge, separate stove burners (no oven), sink and cabinet space) and full bath. As Steven and I had already decided against a single room, it was another bust, but our companions expressed an interest so it was worth the trip.

As we walked up to the third place on our list, Phuong turned from the landlord and said to us, "You've seen this place already?" To which, after looking up at the dirty staircase in the grungy building in front of us, I replied, "yes." We were back at the first place we'd seen on our first day of searching.

Not yet deterred, we traveled on to our last destination in District 5. We pulled up in front of a wide, squat apartment building on a busy street and walked up wide concrete staircase in an airy breezeway to a second story apartment. The apartment was a three bedroom apartment for $500 including utilities. The front door opened up into a large attractive living room with a semi-circular sectional leather sofa in a deep burgundy. To the left of the doorway in an extension of the living room, sat a small glass dining room table surrounded by six attractive metal chairs upholstered with Asian themed fabric. A hallway from the living room let to the two main bedrooms and an Asian-style bathroom (with no separate bathing area, simply a tiled room with a shower head on the wall and a drain in the middle of the floor). The main bedroom, furnished with a large bed and attractive armoire sat on the street side and the second bedroom sat across the hall on the same side as the bathroom. A full kitchen sat to the left of the entrance, away from the street. Leading off the kitchen was an unfurnished third room which Steven immediately dubbed the "exercise room," spilling out onto a second balcony which we were told would house the washing machine. I was immediately put off by the noise of the street which penetrated the atmosphere of the apartment and wasn't giving the apartment any consideration until I noticed Steven looking around approvingly and asking detailed questions of the landlords. I cornered him on the balcony and asked if he was interested in the place and found that he was, so I went back in to look with a more critical eye. Upon closer look I found the apartment to be very nice that landlords, a middle-aged Vietnamese couple alone could have sold me on the place, with their open, friendly faces and their attempts to communicate with us without words. Still somewhat unsure due to the noise of the traffic, Steven and I told them that we would make a decision within the next few days and headed home with a plan to check out the area around our previous first choice apartment to see if viewing the area at night would help us with our decision one way or the other.