My first week was mainly occupied with getting over jet lag, visiting with family, and driving in and out of Tel Aviv looking for an apartment. I rented a car for the first week (Hyundai, Getz), so I visited my good friend Rachel in Gat Rimon a moshav (for more info on what a moshav is and the difference between a kibbutz & moshav click here). Rachel and her husband, Nir, live just outside of Tel Aviv and their neighbours have chickens and roosters running around in their yard. Very cool!
This is Rachel and I out celebrating American Thanksgiving with her friends. We ate cornished hen and couscous in place of a stuffed turkey.In the first couple of days, Rachel and I walked around Tel Aviv looking for apartments, I got a parking ticket, damn it! We saw several places - one looked too much like a hotel room, another was too big, the other too small - it had one room with a single bed, a TV and a tiny kitchen - no stove - come on!! But at least I got to know a few areas in Tel Aviv, thanks to Rachel who showed me around different neighbourhoods and helped me gain perspective on the Israeli rental market. They have a few weird things here when if comes to renting apartments. Firstly, in addition to the monthly rent, a renter must add property taxes, building maintenance, water and electricity to the monthly total. With the exception of electricity, I really don't understand why owners don't just bury the rest of the costs in the monthly rent. It's just complicating things, for no reason... anyway..
The other Israeli rental market phenomenon is real estate agents who pretend to be landlords on renter's websites and when you go to meet them and see the apartment, they show you around and then tell you that they have a few more in the area, and only later will they tell you that they are agents and if you want one of the places that they showed you, you must pay them a full month's rent for their service. When I finally caught on to this, I started asking everyone if they were agents first. Anyway, I got hooked by an agent nonetheless but she agreed to take only 1000 shekels for her service (1 sheqel (ILS) = 3.1 CDN, which is really low right now, so this ends up being around $330). This was better than her original asking price of 3500 sheqels (approx $1,200). I guess she earned her money since she got me into an amazing apartment which was almost taken by someone else. Good apartments go quickly here and they're not so easy to find, I was really lucky. The only downside is that I had to wait 10 days to move in, but luckily my friend Laura offered for me to stay at her place until my apartment was ready. So by the end of week 1, I had an apartment, I visited with family (gained 4 pounds from all the family dinners),
here's how
....I got an interim place in central Tel Aviv, and went partying for the first time ever in Israel - which wasn't much different than going out in Toronto, except that my friends tell me that it feels like a Toronto Saturday night every day of the week here... but the single malt scotch is soooooo expensive. Nonetheless, for a first week, I'd say that's pretty... pretty... pretty... pretty good!!!
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