House Hunter International

Everyone talks about this television show like its so much fun.  Disagree.  Apartment hunting kind of sucks.  Everything that is within the price range I want is not somewhere that I want to live, and everywhere I want to live seems to be a bit higher than I want to pay.  Although, to be fair, I don't really know what I'm basing my price range on.  It seems as if I may need to make some adjustments to my expectations?

I'm pretty indifferent to space, but I definitely care about location.  The other thing I've noticed that I need to be picky about is kitchen.  In the US, I probably wouldn't have even thought to pay attention to that since pretty much everywhere has a decent enough kitchen.  But not here.  Even though they say that people on Singapore eat out a lot, I still would like to live in a place where I feel comfortable cooking a meal for myself.  (But unfortunately, I think I have to put my love for baking on hold.)

This place didn't have a cooking surface at all. There is an electric burner stored on top of the fridge.  Probably the tiniest "kitchen" I've ever seen.  This makes my last apartment's kitchen look enormous!

This is typically what I saw. Tiny space with two burners, no oven, and a washer/dryer smack dab in the middle of it.  Clearly I didn't even consider wanting a dishwasher!

Total luxury. Four burners and an oven!  This was not in my price range :(

I saw 15 apartments in two days. I'm making an offer on one today (everything in Singapore is negotiable).  It's a really lovely apartment, one MRT stop from the office.  The price I'm offering is a little steep for me, but I think it's a great deal for the place, and I don't think it's going to make me go broke. At least I hope not.  That's the thing - I really have no idea how much I can afford because I don't really know how much it costs to live here.  But Chrissy advised me that "you're in a foreign country - the last thing you want when you are homesick is to come home to  an apartment you don't like only because it saved you a few bucks." So we'll see.  Who knows if the landlord will even accept my offer.