We’ve been in Delhi this last week looking for a home for when we move. It has been an interesting experience. We communicated with Radil, our consultant, prior to coming to Delhi and let her know what we were looking for. A flat with at least 3 bedrooms and an office (or 4 bedrooms where one could be used as an office), servants quarters, in the area around Vasant Vihar, where Marty currently lives. We wanted to stay in roughly the same area since Jaya, who will be our cook/housekeeper, has a roommate who owns a nearby restaurant and they need to stay in the area.
The day started with Radil meeting us in the hotel lobby and presenting us with an agenda for the day. It read something like, leave the hotel, spend all day running up and downs stairs looking at one flat after another in heat so hot that you could bake pottery in it until you cry uncle. Or at least that was the way it turned out.
Radil had compiled a list of some 35 flats that she wanted us to see. We needed to climb the stairs to look at most of them since the lift was out in most of the apartments. I can tell you that climbing a million stairs in 113 degree temperature is a way to get a workout! Even though we did take time out for lunch, by about 4:30 we were pretty wilted and were ready to head back to the hotel.
We saw some pretty nice flats, some absolutely horrible flats, and a lot in between. Michelle’s favorite was a ground floor flat with a basement. In the basement was a full ‘disco’ dance floor, complete with flashing lights. Sorry, but we won’t be living there. It had a bedroom in the basement, which ‘is not strictly legal’ here in Delhi. So it was back to work, climbing stairs and looking at flats and hoping that in the next flat, the power would be on so someone could turn on the ceiling fans.
The biggest problem was that virtually all the flats only had one servants quarters. We really need two. One for Jaya and one for Joginder (our driver). At the end of day 1, we had found only one place that had two servants quarters. It was a home, with an upstairs and downstairs. It was older and had been renovated. However, the landlord was pretty proud of the fact that he had turned over 15 people down from renting the flat. I had a unsettling feeling about the landlord, so we crossed that one off the list.
At the end of two days of looking, and returning to a couple of flats, we had two possibilities. One was Marty and Donna’s current flat. The other was another flat that had two servants quarters, but was closer to the airplane flight path (planes flying over made it impossible to talk). We’ve asked the agency to start negotiations for Donna and Marty’s flat. If things work out, it will be nice because 1) Jaya and Joginder can just stay where they are; 2) we can leave all the appliances we are buying from Donna and Marty in place and don’t have to store and move them. The flat has some drawbacks, but it the best that we’ve seen and we’re excited to get the process under way.
I don’t have a picture of the outside of the flat, but I did take this picture of a huge moth we saw while looking at all the flats. Becca, this is for you!
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