Thursday, September 01, 2005
found a place to live..a great relief
We have been looking for places last week to find a place to live this year. The one where we are staying is a temporary one. We finally found one. Kapil from India decided to take another room and the third room is still not occupied. But we are confident that we will find a person for the third room very soon as there are so many people who are still looking for a room.
One part I didn't like about renting this flat was we had to pay one month's rent as the fee for the rental agent. That is a huge amount just for finding a place for us. I wish we had found a place from an agency run by former IESE students. The agency doesn't charge any rental fee for select clients that include IESE students. The fee was 1200 Euros. If you are someone who has just come from Nepal with an exchange rate of 85 Rupees to 1 Euro, you don't even want to think about converting it to Nepali rupees. Now I wish I had come directly from the US where I was working before I spent 2 years in Nepal.
Initially, we were thinking that we would just take a room offered by others who already did the hard work of finding a place. But it seemed like many people don't like to share a flat with a couple, even if the room available was big enough for a couple. Oh well, didn't understand why that mattered. Perhaps there is this stereotype image of a couple who spend time just kissing each other in their room and never getting out of the room to share time with other flatmates. But we were different. Both of us wanted to live with other people in a flat, first just so that we don't feel bored in a new place and second, it would save us a couple of hundred Euros per month.
One great thing about the flat we are going to rent is the distance to walk to IESE. It takes only about 10 to 15 minutes. It doesn't mean I can avoid the uphill path to IESE but I think it is still more convenient than taking a Metro and walking from the last stop to IESE which is Reina Enselida. Just about everybody I have met do not seem to like the uphill path to IESE. It gets worse in hot days, like the one we had today. Talking about that, the last three days have been hot here, little past the "perfect" weather I have been calling.
One part I didn't like about renting this flat was we had to pay one month's rent as the fee for the rental agent. That is a huge amount just for finding a place for us. I wish we had found a place from an agency run by former IESE students. The agency doesn't charge any rental fee for select clients that include IESE students. The fee was 1200 Euros. If you are someone who has just come from Nepal with an exchange rate of 85 Rupees to 1 Euro, you don't even want to think about converting it to Nepali rupees. Now I wish I had come directly from the US where I was working before I spent 2 years in Nepal.
Initially, we were thinking that we would just take a room offered by others who already did the hard work of finding a place. But it seemed like many people don't like to share a flat with a couple, even if the room available was big enough for a couple. Oh well, didn't understand why that mattered. Perhaps there is this stereotype image of a couple who spend time just kissing each other in their room and never getting out of the room to share time with other flatmates. But we were different. Both of us wanted to live with other people in a flat, first just so that we don't feel bored in a new place and second, it would save us a couple of hundred Euros per month.
One great thing about the flat we are going to rent is the distance to walk to IESE. It takes only about 10 to 15 minutes. It doesn't mean I can avoid the uphill path to IESE but I think it is still more convenient than taking a Metro and walking from the last stop to IESE which is Reina Enselida. Just about everybody I have met do not seem to like the uphill path to IESE. It gets worse in hot days, like the one we had today. Talking about that, the last three days have been hot here, little past the "perfect" weather I have been calling.
