Swedish design

We did it! Tanya and I found an apartment! In fact, we've known we had the apartment for a while now, but we hadn't moved in yet and I was holding off blogging about it for fear that it would somehow be jinxed. Finding an apartment in Lausanne is hard. After we arrived, when we met anyone new, the first thing they would say would be "how's the apartment search going!? It'll take you a long time!". After hearing about other people's experiences it seemed the thing to do was to make a dossier of information to give to the real estate agents. It was to include anything that a real estate agent might want to know, which is to say much more than you should ever have to give them. So in went a work contract, letters from the Contrôle des Habitants saying we have work permits, bank statements, and a nice letter in French explaining our situation to go on the front.

Ikea is about a 30 minute train ride from Lausanne.

The one thing real estate agents asked for but that we didn't have was a so called "extract" from the Office des Poursuites, which states you have no debts. As it turns out, this was easily solved, because even though we had just arrived in the country the office was still quite happy to print out our empty debt records for the bargain price of CHF 18 each. In fact, the Office des Poursuites was by far the least efficient thing I've seen since arriving in Switzerland. On walking in you are greeted by the greyest of grey rooms containing a crowd of people milling around a lot of closed doors. Next to each door is a little light and when it flashes green, somebody from the crowd walks up and enters. There are other doors that busy, stern people with papers keep walking in and out of, but those doors are locked to the public. So the idea is to wait until its your turn and then wait for a light to flash saying you can go in a door. The problem is that there is no queue and no ticket system, so the crowd has to collectively remember what order they arrived in. People were generally pretty good at this but I'm sure I was beaten to my turn by a snarky lady with aggressive heels.

In any case, whether it was the dossier or just pure, dumb luck, Tanya and I were offered an apartment in just under two weeks of solid searching, which might be some kind of record for this market. And it's beautiful! It is light filled and spacious and it has a balcony from which you can see the mountains in one direction and the lake in another. We moved in a few days ago, which means that it's pretty much been Ikea week here. I've always secretly wanted to shop at Ikea, so I jumped at the chance to buy my entire household there.

Ikea had the nerve to tutoie me even before we'd met!

After an initial reconnaissance trip to Ikea, Tanya and I hired a van for an afternoon and ventured forth to buy everything you need when you're setting up a home in a new country. Driving the van out was quite a big step for me because it was the first proper time I've driven on the right side of the road. And when I say the right side, I mean the wrong side. The things that are the hardest are round-abouts and remembering to merge back into the right after overtaking a car on the highway. By the end of the day I had driven a huge van bursting with heavy furniture in peak hour traffic at night, so it was a bit of a trial by fire!

A very posed photo with the van.

It turns out setting up an apartment entirely from scratch is quite an involved process. We came over here with no furniture at all and our apartment is unfurnished. Ikea is quite amazing in the amount you can get in one go, though, so now we have an apartment in which even the dishwashing brush was bought at Ikea. We have one pot and one frying pan and one knife - just enough to cook for now!

Apartment filled with stuff.

It was the same day we got the keys to the apartment that we filled it with boxes, and since then we've been slowly unpacking and setting things up. Putting together Ikea furniture is a surprisingly complex task at times, but it's very satisfying. It is wonderful to feel like we are settling in here in Switzerland. We have a place to call our own, it is warm and comfortable, and I feel exceptionally, incredibly, almost guiltily lucky.

Tanya examining how to assemble the bed.