Story of a house - part 1

9 years ago

It was a Sunday morning like many others. Cars driving on the street outside, birds being fried on the power lines, old women tripping, falling, and breaking their coccises. A normal morning.

Maybe it was the thought of getting done with my latest job assignment - and the associated prospect of getting some more money in the bank - or maybe I was just not in the mood to stay in bed, but I got up and started working hard, like I had not done in a while, at least not on a weekend day.

After three Nutella sandwiches and my daily Centrum pill, around 14.00, I received an email from a housing agency I had contacted just one hour before, telling me some details about that apartment. My face remained quiet and rested, as I replied to another among the millions of housing emails exchanged over the last 5 months. Five minutes later, another email, another reply. And ten minutes after that, once again the same. Work went by fine, a lot was accomplished that morning.

In the meantime my host awoke. We agreed to postpone lunch to a concept we made up on the site, which we called snunch, or lunchack - a combination of lunch and an afternoon snack. Around 18.45 another email, this one mentioning the words "visit to the apartment" for the first time. I was dazzled. Visits on a Sunday? Wow. I agreed to visit at around 19.45, one hour after the email.

Arriving at the site I could not believe my eyes. Damn, an apartment at Leidseplein - almost the heart of Amsterdam - this is crazy! After freezing a bit out in the cold, a couple shows up; they were also there to see the apartment. Damn - I thought - this can't be good. I just hope I was the first to reply. The agency guy shows up at last, riding a great looking motorcycle (gotta love them ;)) and we started the visit.

The apartment was somewhere in between my first and my second apartments in the Netherlands: Bigger than a studio, smaller than most one bedroom apartments. Still, it felt cozy and big enough for me. Plus, it had a garden, how cool is that? As soon as I got back to the agency guy I told him I thought it was excellent and that I was definitely interested. This triggered some kind of tribal response on the, so far inert, couple that was still discussing something I could not quite figure out what (have to learn Dutch, I know). Looking at the weird expression on my face, the agency guy promptly translated what they said to be something like "we are going to decide if we are interested, we will be back in 30 minutes". I thought to myself "what?" and, as they left, I continued to press the agency guy with the idea that I was really interested. At some point he basically gave up on the couple and told me to drop by the agency the day after. Case closed.

So the short story is: I have found a house, on a Sunday at the end of the afternoon, after 4 months looking for one during the day, every weekday. Plus I found it on my lucky day number, 13. How's that for fate?