Apartment Secured!

Jenny and I are happy to report that we have signed a lease for an apartment for this year. The price, location, and characteristics (which you can see a little of from the pics) are all good and we are happy to have it secured. It's located in the Katamon neighborhood on Bilu street, about a ten minute walk south to Pardes and even closer to Emek Refaim, which is a popular strip of restaurants and stores. Katamon is known to house many English speakers and students.

From the outside view you can see our place on the 3rd and top level. The next picture is of the main room, which is curved and you can actually see the outside of it in the previous pic. The deck was one of the main selling points of this place, and for those of you who plan on visiting us this year, I look forward to sharing a beer with you while overlooking the Jerusalem skyline.

The hardest part about the process was that the contract was in Hebrew; of which we speak very little, let alone Hebrew legal nomenclature. We had three resources here in Israel (including two attorneys) that were able to read the contract for us and report on its fairness. All three of them told us that the contract was super pro-landlord, worded ambiguously in several areas that we should be concerned about, and generally written poorly - not to mention that we were being required to pay a very high security deposit AND a promissory note. When we tried raising some of our concerns to the landlord, Itamar, his reply was consistently, "well, no. that's not what that section means. if you are uncomfortable than you shouldn't take the apartment." - typical Israeli in our opinion! Well, after waivering back and forth for several days and hearing all of the conflicting opinions, we decided to sit down with Itamar and hash out some of our concerns in person. He seemed to understand and made some handwritten changes to the contract we ended up signing. There still are some reasons for us to be concerned, but I think we may just take out a whole crapload of insurance to cover ourselves just in case!

Ok. We move in on Sept 1st.
Take care, love,
us.