Apartment Woes

As seems to have become the norm, it's been a couple weeks since I last wrote, but rest assured it was not for a lack of experiences!  In fact, the last couple weeks have been been jam packed with most free time dedicated to the search for a new apartment.  As aggravating and time consuming as this process proved to be, it has in fact been a really wonderful way to get to know the city.  I can now locate nearly every major neighborhood, tell you which ones have easily accessible public transport, and roughly how much it costs to live there.  In addition, I got a chance to see quite a few areas from the back of my housemate's motorcycle, which has drastically improved my understanding of traffic patterns in the complex and often inanely complicated system of one way streets, rivers, canals, highways and metro overpasses that make up the city of Medellin. 

That said, it's still no fun to look through thousands of advertisements, pick out a couple dozen, make the requisite inquiries and end up with a short list of 3 or 4 visits.  Of the 5 or 6 places I personally saw, only 3 were livable.  Of those, 2 were beautiful, but in terrible locations and the third was way over budget.  Luckily, my housemates stumbled upon one that seemed to have everything going for it at the end of last week, and we rushed to get the papers signed.  Or rather, we tried to rush to get the papers signed. 

I'm still not exactly clear as to what papers we ended up needing precisely, but since barely anyone uses a credit card and banks are just where you go to cash checks, there's no such thing as a credit check to assure the validity of a potential renter's ability to pay.  Instead, you must get someone who has a certificate of ownership for a vehicle to sign on your behalf, as well as someone who owns their own house.  I think there might have been a few other requirements, but those were the ones that stuck.  Each of those people has to receive the original, hard copy of the appropriate form directly from the leasing agency, sign it, fingerprint it, and return it.  In our case, this meant sending  half the paperwork as quickly as we could (24-36hrs depending on the day and time) to V's parent's in Bogota, and the other half had to be driven out to R's cousin an hour outside of town.

Then we waited 2 days, hoping for good news.  On the second day we called to determine whether our application had been accepted.  Well, not quite yet.  Apparently the central headquarters for the government agency responsible for leases had attempted to call our references, but had only gotten through to one, as the other works on a flower farm in the middle of nowhere and doesn't have reliable cell phone service.  Naturally, we asked whether he could call them instead so we could resolve the issue the same day.  Nope.  That particular office seems to not have a phone number, despite having the sole responsibility of calling and confirming references.  They kindly informed us that they would go down the list one more time the following day, but that if our reference didn't answer at that precise moment, our application would be denied.

Having no back up apartment on the books and with no more time to go through the whole papershuffling extravaganza again, all we could to was to cross our fingers and hope.  Late the following day, by some miracle our reference managed to receive the precious phone call, passed all inspections and our application was accepted as of today.  Well, almost.  We're accepted, but now we have to get the same 2 people to sign (and fingerprint) the lease.   So, we've send off all the appropriate forms and are once again awaiting with bated breath, hoping the gods of mail delivery shine upon us.   With the best of luck, we should have the keys late tmw.  With not such good luck, well, let's not think about that option.