One of my guilty TV pleasures is HGTV's "House Hunters International."  I used to watch "House Hunters," but the endless recaps of what we've just seen three minutes earlier and the repetitive scripts with everyone making the same demands (open concept, granite countertops, stainless steel appliances, two sinks in an en suite bathroom) have made it a parody of itself.  The international version is still interesting, if often a little baffling: the buyers all seem to have an excess of money over taste and little understanding of the language or culture of the country they're moving to.  They don't know what a bidet is or why a washing machine might be in the kitchen.  If they want something "traditional," they complain about small spaces and "dated" (a favorite word) furnishings; if they want something modern, they complain about its lack of character.  Watching those who are renting always makes me grateful for the good luck I had in finding apartments to rent when I lived and taught abroad.

My first experience was moving for a year to Skopje, Macedonia (then a part of Yugoslavia).  All the Fulbrighters who would spend the year in Yugoslavia met for orientation in Belgrade, and there I made friends with a young American couple, Larry and Suzanne, who were also going to be in Skopje.  I had spent part of the summer studying Serbo-Croatian (as it was then called; now that term is too fraught to be used), the closest language to Macedonian I could find at KU.  That meant I was the spokesperson when some of us would go out on our own in Belgrade.  Given my feeble mastery of the language, we had some unexpected experiences and surprising meals.  Even though we had just met, Larry, Suzanne, and I decided that if it was easier, we'd get an apartment together.  That turned out to be a great decision, as the three of us had a fine time.  With the help of Velko, the department chair, we found a huge apartment to share.  The apartment on Ulitsa Kozle was a bit far from the city center, but a bus stopped right outside our apartment--and going into town we were the second stop, so it was empty.  Coming back from the city center, however, wasn't so easy, and we all three learned to push those ahead of us with an elbow in the back like a local would.  The apartment had a very large combination kitchen, dining area, and living room.  Three huge windows looked out on the foothills of the mountains that surrounded Skopje, and we could watch the gypsies and their donkeys as they went up and down the hills.  Colleagues from the university donated enough furniture so that the room didn't look too barren, and it make a great open space for parties.  The only drawback was that I slept on the couch.  I didn't mind that arrangement, but it did mean that I could never go to bed till the last visitor left.  There was a real bedroom for Larry and Suzanne and two bathrooms.  Mine was tiny, but modern.  The shower wasn't separated by anything from the rest of the bathroom, and it took me a while to remember that I needed to put the toilet paper outside the door when I took a shower.  One problem is always doing laundry (there were no laundromats), but we hired a gypsy family who picked up our dirty clothes once a week and returned them clean and ironed.  (There's a sentence not many of you have ever written!) 

Housing was already arranged for me when I arrived in Sofia, Bulgaria--an apartment in a huge complex of Soviet-style blocks.  The complex was called Druzhba Dve (friendship--or more accurately 'comrade-ship'--two).  I should have known this wasn't going to be a happy arrangement when my Bulgarian seat mate on the plane from Frankfurt to Sofia sadly shook his head and gave me his phone number in case I needed help in finding a new place to live.  On seeing the buildings, which were falling apart, I thought they had been constructed in the 20s or 30s, but no, they were from the 1970s.  There was trash everywhere.  There were packs of dogs and groups of gypsies (there's a theme emerging here) that would go through anything that was actually put in the dumpsters, leaving piles of trash on the ground.  (The locals were often nostalgic for the good old, Communist days when many Vietnamese came to Sofia, because, so the legend went, they solved the roaming dog problem by eating them.)  Many residents didn't bother with the dumpsters and just threw bags of trash out of the windows.  Falling trash was a common sight.  The apartment itself was unbelievably depressing.  The bathroom was an interior concrete room with a faucet for "showering" coming out of the wall at waist level and dispensing cold water.  The toilet hadn't been cleaned since construction days, and water sprayed out of the topless tank every time I flushed.  The lock on the door worked sporadically, though I was more often locked inside the apartment than outside.  I had visions of my skeleton being found months later, my bony hand still trying to turn the key to get out.

Also living in Druzhba was an American couple, Andrew and Michelle, and Michelle and I set off to find a more pleasant place to live.  We went through an agency and together looked at perhaps a dozen equally depressing apartments until, feeling like ugly Americans, we emphasized that we were looking for 'luxe.'  One day we ventured out separately and both had success, finding two apartments that were about 100 meters from each other.  When we went to sign the lease, despite my shaky Bulgarian, I did read a sentence that said that the landlord could not raise the rent more than 300% every four months.  The agent was nonchalant: "That's if you're paying in levove, but you'll be paying in dollars," so that sentence was crossed out.  My apartment was on the 13th floor of a newer building.  It was beautiful.  I certainly wasn't superstitious about living on the 13th floor, but that did become a hassle when the electricity went out and I had to walk up twelve flights of stairs or was caught in the elevator.  (I learned which panel concealed a manual door release.)  The landlady, Maya, who became a wonderful friend that year, was an artist for the Communist city government, but as Communism was belatedly collapsing in Bulgaria, she was going to live in her atelier while renting her apartment for dollars.  Since no major purchases could be made in levove (only in dollars or Deutschemarks), with my deposit she bought a washing machine for the apartment.  One problem solved.  The apartment was beautifully furnished, had two bedroom, a large bathroom, and even a balcony, though there wasn't much to see except unfinished construction sites and falling trash.  Whenever other Fulbrighters from around Bulgaria came to Skopje, mine was the preferred apartment for sleeping.

In Meknes, Morocco, I stayed in a downtown hotel while the department chair and I searched for apartments.  After several fruitless attempts, we decided to go to an agency.  On the steps of the building we met a woman who had an apartment to rent.  She was clearly very rich.  She and her husband were from the Rif Mountains (the primary source of Moroccan hashish) and lived in Amsterdam, where they ran several cafés.  But they came to Morocco for a month each year, kept one apartment there for their yearly visit, and had another in the city center which they had never rented.  We went to her apartment for coffee; it was huge and furnished entirely in furniture imported from Italy.  There was also a room full of furniture from the other apartment; the agent had told her that the apartment would be easier to rent unfurnished.  We walked to the second apartment, and it was huge--two salons, a big kitchen, two bedrooms, two bathrooms.  And it was also very empty.  Despite the chair's insistence that I could get cheap furniture at Ikea, I wanted the real stuff, so for an extra few dollars a month (money was clearly not her primary concern), I rented it furnished.  Now, nothing gets done quickly in Morocco, but money speaks there as well as anywhere else, and within 24 hours every bit of furniture, three crystal chandeliers, and several crystal wall sconces were back in place. As an extra bonus, she bought a washing machine.   I felt as if I were living in a palace--for, I think, $400/month.  I was in the heart of the heart of the city.  I lived right above my bank and was surrounded by stores and restaurants.  The bathrooms even had "real" toilets, as opposed to the "Turkish toilets" that were much more common.  (The chair was building a new house the year I was there, and after he had had installed regular toilets, his wife made him take them out because they were unsanitary and replace them with holes in the floor.)  When we had left the agency the first day, we were followed by a furtive man who eventually trailed us to the apartment I rented.  No one knew who he was.  Then I began getting letters from the agency, which wanted a cut, threatening to expose me to my employer and to the American embassy.  The agency, as was clear from the letters, didn't know my name or who my employer was, but they still made me uncomfortable.  Sometimes, the man would appear at my apartment, though I never opened it to him, so he would slide another letter under the door.  Finally, since I didn't know what to do about him and the chair was equally ineffectual, I wrote the landlady (I never saw her husband), who said that her husband would take care of him.  That was the end of the threatening letters.

So watching "House Hunters International" leads to some moments of nostalgia and a renewed sense of how serendipitous my own apartment hunting international was.