Apartment Hunting

After being blindly led from apartment to apartment in a frantic search to find housing before it was snatched up by all of the other international teachers this time last year, Steven and I started our apartment hunting early this time around. So early that I had already contacted a few of the online real estate brokers from Atlanta and had an appointment to see an apartment in District 3 on our first day back, Sunday at 11:00 a.m.

Our contact had suggested that we take a taxi to the address of the apartment, but being relatively familiar with the city and having spent the past 38 hours either on a plane, in an airport or sleeping in our hotel, we decided to walk.

I had chosen to see the first apartment specifically because of its location. Steven would be working at the new AIS middle school in Binh Thanh District, which is just north of HCMC’s central District 1. The apartment was in District 3, the district just west of District 1, close enough – I thought – for a convenient, traffic free trip to work. We started from District 1 and made our way down the street into District 3 looking for the address we had been given. As we walked we realized, by looking at the street numbers, that this apartment as quite a bit further from District 1 than we’d realized. About 20 minutes later, with the bridge from District 3 to the next district over just in sight, we found the address and spent the next 20 minutes looking at two tiny apartments in a typical seven story Vietnamese style home that we knew we wouldn’t be coming back to.

Our first option rejected, we began our search anew on Monday. We started by telling everyone we met that we were looking for a place to rent – me, the woman at the front desk of our hotel, her daughter, the woman at the Indian restaurant around the corner and all my friends from SCC – Steven, all of his friends at school , the ladies in administration and the IT guy. Then I started looking for places online and throughout the week arranged to meet with an agent from VN Renting on Tuesday, my Vietnamese teacher, Phuoc from last year on Wednesday, Phuong from Transpo properties on Thursday and an agent from Nice House on Friday.

On Tuesday, I was taken to apartments in Binh Thanh, near Steven’s school. The first one was too small and to far north, the second too big and expensive – both in high rise buildings. Wednesday, Phuoc took me to three different places she had found for rent in the paper – the first, I fell in love with at first sight and would have been perfect if I were single, but I thought that Steven may not have loved the old open air apartment as much as I did; the second , a glorified hotel room with a tiny kitchen and oversized bath, and the third a little two story house near the zoo that was practical enough to warrant a visit from Steven after school, but not enough to stall our search. Thursday, Phuong from Transpo Properties, who had found us our apartment last year, took me to another high rise apartment in District 1, which I loved, but it was big and quite far from the school and, again, in a high rise. Later that afternoon a woman from Nice House took me to see an apartment in the area where our hotel is, which I have fallen in love with, despite it being surrounded by the backpacker area, but it was right on the main street. Friday, I went with the same woman from Nice House, who took me to yet another high rise, even though I told them we did not want to see apartments in a high rise. The apartment was perfect – cheap and beautiful, but in a high rise in District 4.

Initially, all of this apartment hunting was fun. I loved getting back out on the road on our motorbike, spending an afternoon with Phuoc, who has become a treasured friend, and riding on the back of various motorbikes through new and familiar parts of the city, but near the end of the week, I began to get a little anxious. The problem is that I am too focused on finding a specific place that may not exist in terms of our ability to find housing. Steven wants a place with a roof terrace or a balcony somewhere near the school and I want the same, but in an old Vietnamese neighborhood with a local market, street vendors and resident chickens. Unfortunately, most of the places they show foreigners are in these big high rises or more modern neighborhoods, one real estate broker telling me, “Most foreigners don’t want Vietnamese neighbors. They say they are too loud and they do strange things.”

My ideal housing spot looks very much like the alley on which our hotel resides. When you walk out of our hotel door, there is a cyclo parked right outside because a cyclo driver lives across the street. In the evenings, he sits at the shop cum bar that materializes in the corner of the alley next to his house and when he rides his cyclo out in the mornings, he gives me a familiar smile. There are ladies making noodles in the house next store. Two doors down there is a family that sells mouth wateringly delicious clay pot dishes out of their house. At the end of the street there are two chickens that roost on a bicycle leaning against the wall and each morning I look for them to see if they’ve made it past the previous evening’s meal. All through the alley, people are sitting out in front of their houses visiting with their neighbors.

That is my ideal Viet Nam living experience. I know it is out there because I have had the joy of living in it for the past five days, but is it practical to keep passing up other viable options, holding on to this dream of living in my ideal Viet Nam? Steven encouraged me keep looking because neither of us have loved anything that we have seen so far, so I will hang on to the dream for another week or so and in the mean time, I will make the most of where we are right now. Fresh clay pot fish, anyone?