Apartment Hunting Continues

A-Plus: 2 Weeks, 1 Day

One of the problems with searching for an apartment in Israel is that there are no real "apartment complexes" with dozens of rooms for rent owned by one upper-class slumlord like my place back in Walnut Creek. Instead, here each apartment in a building has a different owner, so most apartments are three or four rooms. Until marriage, most people rent out a three-bedroom with roommates, and after marriage they buy a two or three bedroom apartment of their own. This makes it exceedingly difficult to find the sort of one bedroom, one living room apartment that I had back in Walnut Creek. They simply aren't made.

I have been using my internet resources but found that http://www.homeless.co.il/ doesn't have anything in the area I'm looking, and http://www.flathunting.com/is mostly for short-term vacation rentals. I emailed Nefesh B'Nefesh and asked them what I should do. They sent me a list of ideas. One of them was to call to a realtor named Shelly Levine who helps olim find apartments, so I did.

"Hi, my name is Ephraim, I just made aliyah and am having some trouble finding a..."
"- Mazal tov, Wooooow, MAZAL TOV!!!"
I managed to pull the phone from my ear fast enough to avoid any permanent hearing damage.
"So where do you want to live?" she asked.
"Well, right now I'm looking in Pisgat Ze'ev."
"Pisgat Ze'ev is a terrible idea, just terrible! Do you know where all the Anglo singles live?"
"Emek Refaim or Baka."
"Right, you'll be all alone out there, no singles, no Anglos."
"Well, my cousin lives there, and she's from Canada, and for singles stuff I can always take the bus or arrange shidduchim (matches.) What I really need is an office and a separate sleeping room."
"Oh, okay. I think that Pisgat Ze'ev is a wonderful idea!"

I hauled my backpack a couple of miles across town and landed in her office, and she gave me a list of forty apartments for rent in the area, for free (it typically costs about 200 shekels.)
"By the way, where are you from?" she asked me.
"Around San Francisco."
"Oh. And you're looking for a shidduch?"
"Yeah."
"I mean, like, you're looking for a woman, not a man, right?"
I struggled not to roll my eyes.
"How tall are you?" she asked.
"Uh... six foot two."
"GREAT! My daughter is five foot seven, and doesn't like guys under six feet. Give me your cel phone number and when my daughter comes into town, you guys can go out. Don't worry, there's no connection between the date and the apartment list. I help all olim. Now give me your number. Oh, but she's not coming back until Sukkot. Tell you what, you can go out with her friend who'se here now, and if you don't like her friend, then I'll set you up with my daughter. I'm good at this really, I've made seven couples already!"

I came back to Pisgat Ze'ev, list in hand, thinking that I had just solved my housing problems. But then I started to read through the list. I realized that there are actually five Pisgat Ze'evs, there's Pisgat Ze'ev, then there's Pisgat Ze'ev North, South, East, and West, all of them built on separate hilltops and separated by open stretches of empty land. I live in Pisgat Ze'ev East, and so narrowed my search down to twelve units. But once I started calling, almost everything had already been taken. I realize now that every apartment here is taken within a week. Now I've eliminated all but one place, a two-room apartment that is broken off from someone else's villa. I had hoped that the bi-weekly newsletter, Kol HaPisgah, would give me a few more leads, but there was nothing except the one apartment I had already found. Now I'm just sitting here waiting for a call from the landlord.

The problem is that I need to find something very soon, because work is already beginning to sign me up for projects, and I need a faster internet connection, phone, and quiet work space in order to do my job properly. As of now, I can't make phonecalls and am doing everything by email. My employer has been very understanding, but I'm anxious to get settled.