Moving to a New Place

So I don't think I ever mentioned this in the blog, but our sublet ended early -- about a month ago our landlords, who had gone on an extended vacation to Spain with their two babies, decided they wanted to be home for Christmas after all. This was all perfectly above board. From the beginning they had reserved the right to end the contract early, to give themselves more flexibility. This past month THS and I have gone crazy trying to find an apartment in Stockholm but to no avail. Every ad we could find, we would e-mail or call, only to get no response or an answering machine followed by no response. We couldn't figure out what was wrong in our self-presentation. Given that each one of these ads will get over one hundred replies, we may not have been doing anything wrong, actually. It might have just been that by chance no one ever picked us out. After a while, however, we began to have a suspicion: people were offering MORE money in their responses to the ads -- bribing people to take them. So last week we started offering a little more rent than what was officially desired. Still no response. We resigned ourselves to having to stay with friends for a few days before we went home for the holidays and then continue the search in January.

And then, at the last minute, someone called us back! It's a little apartment up on the East Island, one room and an eat-in kitchen. It's not a stylish neighborhood like the one we live in now, and there's no broadband connection, but there's a balcony and windows that have a view of the water with the cruise ships coming in. And that is some consolation, I would say.

It has been harrowing. Consider: we have to move out of our place where we live now on Saturday, and we wrangled and wrangled and now we can move in there on: SATURDAY! So it just happened to work out in the end. Everything came through in the knick of time.

Oh, and the best thing is that we can stay in this place through the end of July!