The Not-Its

I'm sorry I've made you wait for the second episode of (not)House Hunters International.  When we finished looking yesterday, I was so tired that I was beyond making words.  Our really nice agent, seeing the empty stares on all of us, I think, treated us to an afternoon snack of roti prata, at the excellently named Mr Prata, and sent us home.  Prata, by the way, as I understand it, is a uniquely Singaporean but Indian-inspired fried flatbread that you dip into a veggie curry.  We all inhaled it along with hot sweet milky tea and tissue bread, which is a tower of thin, crispy, sugary dough. I felt human, but still aggressively nonverbal, after. Our nice agent ambitiously tried to use the prata-bump in energy to make plans to meet us this morning to revisit any places on our short list, but not even for fried dough was I willing to do three days in a row of house hunting. We'll take the weekend to think and do a little due diligence (house stalking), and we'll meet up again on Monday, after our morning appointment at the very official and slightly ominous-sounding Ministry of Manpower (MOM!) to get or be interviewed for our resident passes.  

So I've spent a lovely day doing laundry in one of those wee washers which is also a dryer and walking around checking out neighborhoods, the kids made it to the pool and have watched lots of tv, and we're no closer to a decision than we were Thursday night.  We still pretty much have the same top three, maybe with one more, and maybe, like Eve, I can't leave well enough alone and had to search on the Internet for cute old houses that we passed and now I'm going to want to look at them.  Worst episode ever--I've jumped the shark.  

 

I'll be turning these notes into a fantastic spreadsheet.  I know, most exciting thing you've heard all day.  

While you wait, let me tell show you a little about some interesting places we saw where we are NOT going to live.

 

Like this place, which is amazing.  If you are a tourist in Singapore, you're probably going to come to this intersection and take a picture in front of this  wavy glass shade thingy at this massive mall.  And that tower above it? Those are apartments where we could live.  It has this pool.

 

Which is ornamented by these gorgeous flowers everywhere.  

 

These condos should not be in our budget.  But they are, and we're not going to enjoy that pool, because this is the view from the balcony.

 

They'll be building a train station next door for the next four years or so, six days a week.  And it sounds like it. Alas.

This is the first house house we looked at (as opposed to a condo). 

 

It has this lovely pool and a wee but perfect garden with a plumeria tree, which I've always wanted.  It's next to a gas station, which was not a deal breaker.  It's also right down the street from the Botanic Gardens again, and the train station which is excellent.  It had a really excellent bookcase that made a hidden door the the master bath; I'm sorry I didn't get a picture of it. I've called it the Thai House in my notes, because it has a Thai-style roof and a big breezy beamed room on the third floor, and that's what our agent called it.  It had Astro turf on the exterior walls, which was also not a deal breaker, interestingly.

 

More entertaining than repulsive, honestly.

I did fall down the stairs (I'm totally fine; I'm well-padded on the area of impact), and that IS a deal-breaker.  It feels like a bad omen to injure yourself on your first visit to a place, and it seems like I'd be asking for further bad luck if we chose it.  And as our charming agent put it, "Asian stairs are made for small feet!" Thank you, darling.  Yes, I've got some conkers, how kind of you to notice.  I think my fall made me mentally veto all other apartments with stairs as well, sadly. Maybe it's Asian stairs, and maybe I just have an ongoing battle with my nemesis, Gravity, that I should consider.

I've seen a bunch of other places with nice pools and decent space, but my notes tell the tale.  "Leaky aircon" is a killer, as is "V.Sm. bedroom?" and I've found that a shiny man in a speedo spoils my impression of a beautiful pool, but for many, it's the lack of comment that kills it.  If all I bothered to note about a place is "fast Internet," that's not going to be a home. I don't know what does cause that feeling, but we did visit a place yesterday that just felt like a place that could be home.  There nothing particularly special about it, though we've established that I'm a sucker for floor to ceiling windows with a view.

 

And I'm intrigued rather than repulsed by this glassed-in kitchen deal:

 

Somehow it's not killing me that there are zero bathtubs in the apartment, because it's a clean, well-lighted place and I like it, and I can see wanting to be here.  I'm not going to be able to quantify that feeling for my awesome decision-making spreadsheet, and I feel on some level like I can't possibly be making a logical, well-justified decision if I can't explain my reasoning. I would not say that I'm a great decider; I waffle enormously and take forever to decide even the smallest things (Please never, ever, ask what I want for dinner.  I won't be able to tell you.), but when I've finally put my feet on a path I'm committed to it. There's going to be some champion-level waffling and hand-wringing going on over the next few days, I suspect. In the end our feelings will lead, despite my most logical intentions, and we'll be another step closer to being at home in a new place.