Ceci n'est pas un blog

At long last and after several false starts we have ourselves an apartment.

After a nice vegetarian curry in the canteen, I went down to the leasing agency at lunch to sign on the dotted line for the apartment I saw on Tuesday. Their offices were amazingly posh, a sign of how hot the Oslo real estate market is. My agent was a bit tied up when I arrived, so I had time to sit in what had once been the living room of the old mansion where the company has their offices. The entry-way was full of dark wood details and gothic revival shapes, stain glass transoms carried this feel into the main rooms with their high coffered ceilings, modern designer lighting, and carefully selected furniture.

Some notes for foreigners looking to move here:

• there is no consistent policy on whether pets are allowed: the policy ranges from "with all neighbors' permission" to "no" to "if the owner likes you" -- no one ever suggested a pet deposit
  
• deposits are at least 3 month's rent
  
• three and five year leases are quite common
  
• in the city bathtubs are quite rare, even if there's scads of room
  
• most Osloensers own, it is apparently easy to get loans and so young professionals find it easy to cash in on the equity of their first crappy apartment that they bought in college
  
• if you want to buy here, the lack of credit history is not a problem and interest rates are low by US standards but apartment prices seem to easily reach Manhattan levels
  
• if you see a nice apartment online, chances are someone else has already rented it, like an auction, you want to get in early and make sure you express interest immediately
  

Tomorrow I should get the keys to our (rented) apartment. Pictures will follow. It is a small fourth floor walk-up in a nice historic building, yellow with decorative carved stonework around the windows. We love the location, not 5 minutes to work, two blocks to St. Hanshaugen park (some photos in my Oslo album), cafes and shopping are close at hand. All the appliances are new. It has high ceilings with decorative moulding, large deep windows, and a remodeled bathroom with tub and heated floor. All in all, everything on our checklist except size.

Finally having this settled means we can book travel for the dogs and, more importantly, for the family. It will make the remaining time apart easier knowing when it will end.

Since it will take many many weeks for our belongings to make the trans-atlantic journey, I will almost certainly spend part of the weekend acquiring a chair, some basic dinnerware, a saucepan, etc. For a while, I will live in quite the monastic cell, awaiting the familiar furnishings, art, books, and bric-a-brac that fill our home. We're certainly not bringing very much ... I imagine that, for a while at least, my weekends will be split between the open air markets and taking the free bus out to Ikea.

Hopefully this luck will carry over to Texas and our house will sell. Things definitely seem to be on the upswing, I even won quite handily at Scrabble tonight.