Week 2

Apartment Search

After four months in Berlin, we finally started apartment search - a renown nightmare when you speak of housing in Berlin. Even before we moved here, we have never stopped hearing about the nightmares of finding an apartment to stay and for this reason, we started looking for an apartment a month to our departure date from Nigeria. Balancing budget an availability was a difficult thing. After a lot of rejections we finally found a place that was willing to let us stay although with a high premium compared to what we budgeted. at this point, we had no choice since our departure is just two more days. Even with this process, I considered us lucky since we heard finding a permanent apartment after reaching Germany is even harder as the process isn't so remote friendly.

January marks four months since we moved here and the lease we got only covered for six months. Our current place has helped us a lot with settling down - we've done all our paper work without worrying about what where we are staying doesn't allow us to do. Of course we could extend, but we both didn't want to stay further in this area and we also hope to take some chance around saving some money from the rent we currently pay. So, we decided to give the ferocious house search a chance again. Deciding early was key for us, so, we agreed with our agent that we would start from January.

Meanwhile, I also proceed to get some info and sample letter, documents, etc. from some of my colleagues at work who has gone through the same process. and by the end of the first week, we were already armed with all necessary things (ones we know of) to start applying for apartments.

Personally, I've had some low hopes about the result from this search - that we should be ready to search for long, that finding a place we would like will be difficult without having to compromise and that we might eventually settle for a place pretty far from the city center. All of this I've learnt reading people's experiences about their house search ordeal.

By the end of the first week, we started applying for places online and of course, the rejection started coming and then we got a response saying we can come view one of the apartment we applied for. Even though, our agent advised we don't go view the place since it doesn't meet the criteria we gave him, I thought since we already got an invitation, I can just have a first experience on how this happens. The highlight for me when I got there was the fact that as early as it seems that morning, about ten other people were already waiting to view the apartment and by the time we started viewing the apartment, we were almost thirty in number. After the viewing, I got a notification that the apartment is now delisted. The first experience even crushed my hope further after seeing the crowd of people who were also willing to get the apartment. We decided to let this one pass since it's in an area that doesn't meet our criteria.

Our agent finally reached out concerning two viewings of which after receiving their addresses, meets our location preferences. We were excited enough to go have a feel of the area the apartment in the evening. One was in the city center while the other is quite close too, we concluded either wasn't so bad after all. Our joy didn't stay for long when we remembered that other 50+ people will also be here tomorrow morning to view them. This was exactly what happened on the day of viewing as lots of people came to view one of the apartment alongside myself. Our agent finally hinted us that the second one (the one in the city center) has an exclusive viewing for us, meaning, we alone will be viewing for now so we can decide to apply before its known to the public.

At this point I started feeling lucky once again and thought, maybe this is it. An apartment in the city center, within budget, has expected facilities and space - this is the dream! Immediately we got to location I can see that indeed I was the only one who was viewing and this feels good. When we made it into the apartment, it wasn't long to see that that apartment meets our standard. The pictures shared already gave us an idea, but you can't be to sure, so a viewing was still necessary.

Right on the spot I told our agent "This is it!" - the perfect apartment we've been looking for. I told him we will apply for this and by the evening of that day, we dropped our application. The next day, we got a confirmation that we've been accepted and can go ahead to sign the contract.

It was hard for me to believe that our apartment search that began at the beginning of the week actually finished at the end of the week with a nice apartment in a good location in the city center. I would say we were quite lucky as not everyone have their home search this easy.

Home Internet breakdown

After four months of using our current home WiFi, it finally gave up and suddenly stopped connecting to the internet. A simple investigation reveals the SIM card is not longer connecting to the Vodafone network. I thought this was going to be the usual basic downtime and was expecting that in few minutes, things should be backup. But minutes turned to hours and hours have turned to days. This happened on Thursday night, we did everything to get this backup on Friday and nothing happened. The house management finally concluded they can't do anything until Monday. This was a tangible dent in my plans for Friday and also the weekend. I've already told one of my colleague at work he'll be able to use some GraphQL implementations I'm working on hoping I would finish it on Friday. I had also planned the watch the new season of Vikings Valhala and there's no better time to do this than after a good week.

We've both depend on the home internet for work since we worked from home and haven't really adjusted our life for cases like this one. Our phone internet data was insignificant. On that same Friday, I tried using my mobile phone hotspot to do some work and have some call and it worked for a while until it finished just when I was on a 1:1 (one-on-one meeting) with my lead and the connection was lost. I couldn't make contact to let him know why the connection broke at this point. Although I already communicated the potential of this happening earlier in the morning.