New Apartment

Our apartment hunt proved successful and we even lucked out by finding an apartment right in the historical center of Brasov. The only downfall is that we have no washing machine, but thankfully, we have friends who oh-so-generously allow us to use theirs. The apartment is nice; it has two rooms – the kitchen and the bedroom, but it’s very spacious. Yes, we have an indoor bathroom with hot water and a working shower, so no more bucket baths for me!

We had looked at one other place but the place we chose was about twice as good and the same price. The apartment “contract signing” process was a bit different than what we’re used to in the States. We had our friend Alex go with us to make sure that we didn’t get screwed over since this was the first time we’ve been through something like this. It was a good thing too because I could imagine that it would have taken about 4 times as long for them to explain things to us.

We got the apartment through an agency, so they took a 50% cut from the first month’s rent. The landlord refused to sign a contract with us because he didn’t want to pay taxes on us and even when we suggested that we pay the taxes he still wouldn’t do it because he said that he had done this before and he had to go through a quagmire of legal work with the former tenants and he wasn’t willing to do this again. Alex said that this was normal so we went ahead and wrote a very non-legal hand-written contract about what was in the apartment so that he couldn’t say we stole anything.

So the plan for now is renting here month-to-month. We may need a contract or documentation for where we’re staying when we go to get our visas and our lack of a contract may be a problem. In this case, we will either have to move out or find some nice person who owns property to say that we’re staying there with them. We will see. The plan this week is to go and meet with someone from the embassy and talk face-to-face with an expert on visa issues.


We’ve only had one real problem with the apartment so far…
It was our second night in the apartment and we had just turned off the TV (it came with the apartment) and both started to doze off to a sound sleep. All of a sudden, we were awoken by a loud POP POP POP coming from the other side of the room! Now I’ve never lived in a house with gas heating before, so my first thought was that our heaters were about to explode and incinerate our entire building. We both jumped out of bed and turned the light on to find plumes of smoke coming out of our TV, and even more distressing, the entire inside of it lit up on fire! Good thing Robert was here, because I was ready to abandon ship. Bravely, he pulled the cord from the wall and saved the day! Below, you will find a reenactment (click on it for more detail):

Besides extinguishing electrical fires, we’ve been keeping ourselves busy with exploring the city and spending time with our new friends. Saturday was an unseasonably warm day, so we took advantage of it by hiking up to the top of Mt. Tampa. There’s a cable car that runs to the top of it, but there’s also a well-maintained trail that zig-zags its way up to the Hollywood-esque BRASOV sign that looks over the city. I imagine during the summer this is not a very difficult trail to casually stroll along; however, we found that the snow that had accumulated on the trail over the past month or so had been packed down and was in the process of melting, thus forming one long icy serpentine slide down the mountain. Did that stop us? No! With only a few close calls, we carefully picked our way up the trail and eventually reached the peak… ok, so Mt. Tampa probably doesn’t qualify us as alpinists, but we definitely broke a sweat. Needless to say, I opted for the cable car ride back down.

Now, we’re waiting for an appointment to talk to the American Embassy in Bucharest to see what our visa options are. After we do that (and hopefully find out that staying longer than 90 days isn’t an insurmountable feat), we’ll have all the information we need to start the job hunt!