The Apartment Search

Our primary mission when we arrived was to find an apartment. Apparently, the way one finds an apartment in Dar is to find “a guy” that knows where the open apartments are and you pick him up and he directs you to them in exchange for one months rent. We can’t really afford this but we’re told by the professor and the grad students that there are no posted listings and you don’t really have a choice. It’s all further complicated by the fact that very few places around here have actual addresses: mail is delivered exclusively to P.O. Boxes and navigation is mostly by placemark. The professor got a “guy” and he showed us an apartment in the neighborhood behind the guest house on our first day in town. It was an immaculate, furnished and air conditioned 2 bedroom apartment for US$ 450/month but an hour from downtown in the boondocks isn’t exactly what we had in mind. We explain that we’d like to be somewhere closer to the city center, the professor acts like this is somehow strange but presumably translates this to “the guy” (he literally refers to him only as “the guy”) and he says he’ll look. A couple of days go by and we hear nothing from the professor or his guy. We try the internet. 99% of what we find are expensive beach villas on the peninsula north east of the city (where all the white people live but we’ll get to that later). The exception is one “real estate agency” that had a couple of vague postings in the in between area we wanted with more reasonable prices (listed in Tanzanian shillings rather than U.S. dollars- looking back this may have been the first warning sign). Encouraged, I call. The person on the other end attempts to speak English to me but I have almost no idea what he’s saying so he hangs up on me. An hour later, someone calls back and wants us to meet at his office but says the location so fast I can’t make it out at all. I try to explain that we don’t really know where anything is but that’s not really getting through so I say I’ll have the professor call him for us. Monday, six days after our arrival, we see the professor for the first time since the first day. He checks in with his “guy”- he’s still looking (ummm….yeah right). I ask him to call my guy and the next thing I know, we’re off. We drive the 3 miles half way into town to pick up the new “guy”. We pull into a petrol station and wait. The guy shows up, jumps into the back of the professor’s SUV, starts up a lively dialogue in Swahilli. We just sit cluelessly in our seats with perma-grins on our faces. No one bothers to tell us this guys name or anything that’s going on. We’re not even asked what we’re looking for. He takes us to see one small house and one apartment both of which are under construction and will supposedly be ready in two weeks (oh and there’s also this bridge for sale…). There also way down these twisting dirt “side streets” that I really don’t see myself walking down by myself or at night. It took two hours to see those two places but we’ve driven no more than 10 miles. All the main paved roads are so congested with cars and pedestrians and all the side streets are dirt with potholes so big they could swallow a small Honda so either way you’re driving 5 mph. The guy continues to make phone calls while going back and forth with the professor in Swahili. We were told we were going to see two places so we’re thinking that was it. When the car pulls up to the side of a busy street and stops, we both start saying bye as the guy gets out. He looks at us weird, then the professor turns off the car and also gets. Apparently we’re not done. We hope out on a bustling road packed with cars, people and shops but not a major roadway. The professor tells us the bridge is down the road which means we’re not too far from the bus route we’ve been taking to and from the city and just inland from the Pennisula with the beaches and all the white people. So in terms of location, this seems good. The people renting the house are Tanzanians that have been living in Norway for the last 20 years. It’s run down but as a field biologist and a student traveling around South America, I’ve stayed in worse. They tell us that two English people used to live here so that’s also encouraging. The professor even negotiates them down slightly on the price into our range. However, Brandt wants nothing to do with this place and is giving me some serious eyeball action while we’re all “talking” things out. Unfortunately, it’s taken over 3 hours to look at these 3 places and without saying so explicitly, we get the impression that the professor won’t be shuttling us around to look at any more places. To make matters worse, the women renting the place is leaving for her house somewhere else tomorrow in the morning and she wants 6 months rent paid in full (!!!!) that afternoon if we’re going to take it plus the fee for the guy. We get back in the car with the professor who clearly thinks this is exactly what we’re looking for. Brandt’s still giving me the death stare so I make the excuse that we couldn’t possibly pull out that much money with our ATM card in an afternoon. But that was a big fat backfire. He asks how much we think we can get out and then drives to the bank prepared to loan us the rest. Faced with offending him and being homeless, the apartment decision has evidently been made. Super. The good news, this place is great blog material. The bad news, this place is great blog material. Stay tuned. This is only the beginning.