Finding an Apartment is stressful!

Finding an apartment in a city where one has no idea of value and is going to overpay due to being a foreigner is upsetting.  It rankles to be taken advantage of, yet it is going to happen.  It’s stressful to look at places that blur together and to have weird time limits and no idea where everything is.

The first day we arrived we saw four apartments.  The following day we saw two more, which were remarkably similar to the first four, but an additional $100-150 per month.  Some things were nice about each place and the only think that seemed to differentiate them was price, proximity to our work and the number of rooms – apartments here aren’t two bedroom apts, they are three rooms i.e. living room plus bedrooms.  The exteriors of the buildings, and the hallways are uniformly frightening here in Bishkek.  The building we chose has a window at floor level in the stairwell that is wide open and calls to children to play with it.  Come and see, it seems to say.  My son, thankfully seems scared of it.

On our third day in Bishkek, we were basically given a choice – pick one of the six places we saw or spend a few more days at the guesthouse and then move into the President of AUCA’s apartment (which was super nice of him) and continue searching.  Then we would transition to one of the cheaper places for a month and hope that September would bring new opportunities. We were, in a sense, stuck between the rock of limited housing and the hard place of overpriced housing.

I chose, for better or worse, to rent the most expensive place we saw.  It was also the largest – 4 rooms -and had room for a home office and two bedrooms, luxuries here in these former Soviet blocks.  We are no doubt paying too much, but we have a stipend for housing that covers about 2/3’s of the cost of the place.  We also had to pack our stuff up and move in 15 minutes, a feat that most could not accomplish, but my wife has extreme packing skills.  Due to the holiday – the little Eid, or Eid-ul-fitr, which most people in Kyrgyzstan seem to have no idea about – we had to move immediately on Wednesday evening or wait until Monday.  We made the leap, for better or worse.  For the better – super close to school, has two Soviet death playgrounds in the courtyard, there is a small-medium sized supermarket I call Beyonce Mart (due to one wall of it being coated with her image) that is less than ten minutes walk, and there are more playgrounds nearby, an amusement park and natural parks and, of course, the space to spread out inside the apartment.  The worse – definitely overpaying and the windows are new which means my son could conceivably open them and fall out. We're on the third floor and its a little scary, but he seems to be old enough to understand not to play with the windows.     

Sometimes it’s hard to be here i because the options you are presented with are not great.  And you don’t know what else is out there, because you lack information and access.  When the choices and decisions are made by others, they can take indefinite periods, but when they get back to you, you have to decide immediately.  

Another interesting feature of housing in Bishkek are addresses.  Knowing what blocks you’re between is helpful, and the streets are, more often than not, labelled.  They never labelled on street corners, which is irritating, but on the sides of large buildings, so you use them more to confirm your location than to find out which way to go.  The actual numbers of buildings usually refers to a block of housing which always has multiple, non-connecting entrances.  In Bishkek, you just need to know where you’re going and usually, you can’t get there directly from here, you gots to go around.