A Room of My Own... or a closet

(my street)
For those of you who don't know, the past week and a half or so, I have been apartment hunting. This has been a really interesting/stressful/funny experience: I'm sure a lot of you can relate, just with less Hebrew. Anyway, it has been really hectic with a lot of calling and calling back and finding friends who speak Hebrew and wandering around town and being told we we crazy. There was even one guy who had an apartment IN THE MARKET. Like you had to walk past a bunch of dead chickens to get to our door. We were supposed to have moved out by today, to avoid paying for the entire semester (classes started today! - more about that later), so we were getting more and more desperate as the weekend wore on. By Saturday afternoon we had one more place to see, and the chicken guy was our best bet- even though to live there I would have had to sleep in a closet- anyway, not important. So we go to see this one last place and it is BEAUTIFUL. Its in this incredible neighborhood on this amazing street next to the most adorable coffee shops you can imagine. And although it is listed as a 1 bedroom, it has two covered balconies, two sofas, a kitchen, a dining room- basically just a lot of space: enough that it is actually feasible for three of us to sleep there. SO- we were all really excited and told him we wanted it. The only problem was that the current resident didn't leave until March 17, but as the landlord- Yonatan- informed us, we could figure something out. He also told us he could lower the price because we are students and said even though he had another couple coming right them, he would tell them that we had priority. His generosity was all a little out of place until he told us that he was a professor at Hebrew University (and liked to help out students when he could) and his wife was a print maker (just like one of the girls I am going to be living with). So we scheduled to meet today and work out the final kinks. HOWEVER. There's one problem. Because of the gap in time between when we can move in and when we have to move out, we had to go talk to the university about extending our contract in the dorms without committing to the whole semester. This presented a HUGE problem because the university has been incredibly unhelpful in regards to our living situation: this is partially their fault, and partially the fault of the dorm authority who is a separate company entirely than the university people. So anyway, we went into see Yonatan today, and he takes us to his office and offers us tea and tells us about how he persuaded his wife to lower the price for the semester and how the washing machine is broken but he will fix it right away and how he can store any of the furniture we don't want, etc etc NICE NICE NICE. THEN he goes- well I can ask my guy to move out earlier and we can go talk to the school right now and try to figure out the difference. Umm, thanks random landlord who we just met two days ago. So he marches with us all over campus, cutting through red tape right and left talking about how we are his family and he doesn't want to have to get his father involved (someone high up in Hebrew U). So we get to talk to the main guy and he promises that he will take care of it and call us back tomorrow. And then about 15 minutes ago Yonatan called to check in on us and make sure things were working out ok. I still can hardly believe it. There is no way we would have been able to figure this out by ourselves. The first thing I'm doing when we move in is learning how to cook so we can invite Yonatan and Co. over to an awesome Shabat dinner. 

So, the conclusion to this story is: Although its not 100% entirely positive, I am probably going to be living here for the next months: http://jerusalem.craigslist.org/apa/1031743736.html

Everyone please send good thoughts to Yonatan, and all the other wonderful people I have met here who have gone out of their way to help me- there have been a lot. Its really amazing to live in a place where everyone looks out for eachother so well.