Apartment Search Continued

We spent the whole day Saturday looking for an apartment. The plan was to look at a few places and then go to the apartment Jiyeoun had the contract for. I'm not exactly sure what happened. I think Jiyeoun realized that I would probably be disappointed with the apartment she chose after seeing my reaction to the first few places we saw on Saturday. I turned up my nose at a some places she thought were "okay." She told me that I might have lowered my expectations if I had been with her last week when she was searching for apartments. There are a ton of old, dirty, funky flats for rent in Taipei. Shit-holes really. So the search continued.

I found a place I liked. It was clean, perfectly located across the street from Jiyeoun's university and close to my school, in a busy district, close to shopping and good restaurants, sunny, and had a balcony and a common garden patio. The only drawbacks were that it was small, expensive for it's size, and lacked some of the furniture we wanted. It's my first choice by far. But, Jiyeoun's not sure. So we keep looking.

We took a break from the apartment search today for lunch. Mrs. Lu cooked us a gigantic, wonderful meal. It included fresh fish, porridge, fried greens, pork, shrimp ball soup, tofu, bitter melon, noodles in brown sauce, and marinated tofu with roots and carrots.

Mrs. Lu is a wonderful cook. She made the whole meal in under an hour, which I found amazing. Honestly, part of it was a stalling tactic. She told us as much.

The Lus are putting the hard sell on their offer for us to stay with them. We had a big talk about it this morning and they genuinely seem to want us to stay. I think they like the extra excitement of having more people in the house. And, to their credit, they understood our apprehensions even before we voiced them. Jiyeoun and I are going to have to think about it more.

Jiyeoun's the one who has to do the thinking, really. I've made up my mind. The Lus' place is very comfortable and they are really first-class people. Having them to help and show us around would add a lot to our experience in Taiwan. Plus, they seem to genuinely enjoy us being here and are laid back enough not to worry about the usual small daily annoyances that go with living with non-family-members. Jiyeoun's got some thinking ahead of her. But, she seems to be leaning toward staying.