Getting an apartment!

So, I had picked up the contract on Friday for the apartment with the two young Israelis. It was located a block off Shenkin which is the trendy, shopping street in Tel Aviv. The contract was nine pages long! I took photographs of the pages and photoshopped then PDFed them into an email-sized document. I sent it to two Israeli friends and to my cousin in St. Louis. She passed it along to an Israeli lawyer she's friends with. One of my friends had his co-worker's mom, also a lawyer, read it. She said not to sign it because of some really strange clauses.

I had already been told about the 4500 NIS deposit in cash and the three month's notice if the owners wanted to do any remodeling. I wasn't happy about the deposit, but I knew about it. The first lawyer response was that there were a lot of clauses that weren't at all clear, like the amount of the rent. All it said in the contract was that the rent was 4500 NIS. My part of the rent was supposed to be 1600 NIS, but that figure didn't appear anywhere.

Friday night I was pretty bummed, but my friend picked me up and we went with two of his friends to a bar/lounge near Yafo. I wasn't able to make any progress on Saturday because of Shabbat. Instead, Sam, Lindsay and I walked to watch Israeli folk dancing on the beach. Yonni met us on his bike and then we met up with Daniel and walked around a bit. Lindsay and I were worried about not be able to take the bus back to Yafo. We didn't want to ditch Daniel, so he came with us. We hung out on the roof of Sam's apartment chatting for a little while.

Sunday morning my cousin's friend the lawyer called me from the states. She had stayed up until midnight to call, which was really nice of her to do. She said the rental agreement wasn't great, but it wasn't the worst one she'd ever seen. I could sign it, but there were a lot of clauses to protect the landlord and blame the tenants for as much as possible. So, Sunday I started collecting listings again. I called people and tried to arrange meetings. In the morning I went to the bank. Then, Lindsay and I met up for lunch. After our salads, I called Anton, the Ukranian (mis-identified as Russian last week) guy from the apartment I had really liked. He said he'd call after 6, which I was a bit confused about. He hadn't said no, but he hadn't really wanted to talk to me on the phone.

I figured I needed to keep looking at places, so I called some more. Then Lindsay and I walked around the shuk and went to the beach for a bit. She had to go, so I went to Dizzengoff to use wifi and find more apartment listings. Anton still hadn't called me back and I was convinced I was going to be homeless on my birthday. At 7, Anton's former roommate, Vicki, called my cell. She said, "Anton told you, right? You're the new roommate." I was shocked and excited. She told me to come by in an hour. In the meantime, Daniel was on the other side of Dizzengoff; we met up and went to see a place on Ben Gurion. The place was on the ground floor and looking for a female, so it didn't work for either of us. I went to Anton's and talked to him and Vicki. I signed the lease (a 2.5 page document!) by 9pm and was immediately given a key!

Then I went for some gluten-free pizza with Daniel. It was the first time since finding out I'm allergic to wheat that I've had pizza. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't fabulous either. I met up with Sam to get the key before heading back to Yafo to get some sleep.