The Apartment-Hunt !@#$ing Continues

So I woke up this morning to an email from the property agency in Paris that the owner of that studio apartment that I had been looking at had decided to go with another renter. Fuck.

This leaves me with the choice of taking the 13m2 (190 sq ft) studio for 600€, or crashing on friends’ couches until I find something reasonable. I emailed and texted a few friends for advice, thought about it for a bit, and then realized that there was just no way that I could put up with being in a 13m2 closet on the ground floor with no sunlight for 12 months. Especially not for 600€ ($876.45 or pretty much what I pay for my huge 1BR in Chicago).

My intuition was pretty good, actually, as I soon after got an email from a friend with a connection to a friend-of-a-friend that was renting two apartments. One is a 34m2 studio in Suresnes (a suburb near La Défense, just outside of Paris) and another is a 35m2 1-BR in Romainville, which is a fair bit further out of Paris, about a 10-minute ride on a bus after getting off at the last stop of the métro line. Both are going for 700€. The latter would be ideal if it wasn’t so far out of town—which will be a big problem when I’m coming back from clubs—and the former is completely unfurnished, which will suck for me. Ah well, we’ll see what comes of that.

Anyway, this evening I went out with Fantômette for a goodbye dinner. We headed out to check out this restaurant called Seerose that was all-vegetarian. The set-up was sort of like a traiteur or something, where all the dishes were already prepared and under glass, and you would come to the counter and ask for a combination of things, and then they would stick it in an oven to warm up and then pile on some salad and hand it to you. For 5,50€, you got about 3 or 4 hot dishes and about the same number of salads heaped onto a large plate. It was kinda insane.

From there, we wandered around that area of Kreuzberg (near Mehringdamm) looking for a bar, but it was all a bit trendy and annoying, so we ended up back in my neighborhood, in this bar on Hobrechtstraße that serves Chechen beers. While there, we ran into the girls that I had taken out to Berghain the Saturday before, and we got to chat a bit and review the weekend. Once our beers were done, Fantô and I said our goodbyes and headed back to our respective homes.