Apartment Hunting

You can find anything here - from ultra modern, furnished, fully 'serviced' (a maid comes in and does everything from scrub your apartment clean to washing and folding your laundry) apartment with a roof top pool and gym. Like this place, which is $1200/mo + utilities for a 2 bedroom:

To the other end of the spectrum, where you can find more of a 'local style' apartment that has a very strange lay-out and the curious bathroom style of simply having a shower wand in between the sink and toilet and you just take a shower in the middle of the bathroom, spraying water everywhere.... for about $450/month:

I visited about twelve different apartments on the back of a realtor's scooter over three days. Marshall and I carefully analyzed with the help of some awesome 'sell sheets' I made for the main contenders. The result?

Before I get to that, let me share a couple insights that I gained about the culture and lifestyle here:
1. A higher price doesn't necessarily mean that you get more or that it's better in some way from the lesser expensive apartments. Prices seemed to be pretty arbitrary and were not indicators to the style of apartment you were looking at. A $600 place could be really sweet and new where a $1000 place could look like it came out of a 2003 Asian JC Penny catalog. Logic has it's own style and rules here.

2. You may have to be a bit of an elitist or a tad soulless to live in a luxury apartment around here. To build that apartment building, the government probably showed up with bulldozers one day and forced families to move out of their tin roof shanties. One such apartment I looked at was pretty nice, it was brand new and had a modern european design and a cute little balcony that looked out onto a dusty, garbage filled lot with a couple huts that people called home. The stark disparity of living standards was a slap in the face.

So after working with three different realtors to try to find that perfect place... we decided to go with none of those options. Instead, I found a house share on Craigslist - a large 5 bedroom Villa, to be shared with people from around the globe - Vietnam, Germany, UK, Wisconsin!, and New Zealand. It is a fancy place and people were probably displaced to build it...but at least its being put to good use (and not a half-empty building). It made the most sense to us because it's pretty cheap ($525 including all utilities and services; to be split between us) and more importantly, gives us the chance to meet people, make some friends, and gain some tips that will help us ease into living in a new district/city/country.

Here are some pictures: