Ants in the Sugar – Part One

(Tuesday 9^th – Thursday 11^th November)

Well, there had to be a down sooner or later and the sudden acquisition of the apartment was it. Having spent a sizeable chunk of my day off yesterday cleaning the kitchen, I’ve just got up to find ants in the sugar. A further twist in the, so far, rather tortured relationship I have with the apartment.

I was so excited when I found it last Tuesday night. Then overnight the panic set in. For a start, it’s in a different area of the city to where I’d been looking before, and slightly further away from school. Then it’s at the top-end of my budget ($600), which I suspect is possibly a little on the high-side - although yesterday I stumbled across a website offering it for $700! Plus, while the rest of the apartment has been redecorated to suit modern Western tastes, it seems someone forgot the bathroom, which doesn’t look as if anyone has bothered much about it since the place was built. And the building is, to put it kindly, not exactly in the first flush of youth.

It was also the last place the agent showed me on that evening, and after a varied assortment of potential-definite no’s, plus one definite maybe, I was getting tired and depressed. The guesthouse was wearing me down through noise and lack of sleep, and I just wanted out. The thought of having to repeat the process of house-hunting again on my next day off was demoralizing. So agreeing to take this place and paying the landlady a holding fee to stop her showing it to anybody else was followed by a sleepless night worrying that I had rushed into it. I probably should have called the agent and slowed things down.

But by then I was so tired I wasn’t thinking straight. And I had to get the deposit together before signing the contract on Thursday morning. And, of course, I’d be at work for half of Wednesday.

Now, getting your hands on two months’ deposit plus a month’s rent in advance, in cash, in a foreign country can be complicated at the best of times. Add in the landlady’s insistence on payment in dollars – the ATMs, unsurprisingly, spew out dong - and you’ve got the added hassle of calculating exchange rates, commission charges and, indeed, finding an exchange bureau willing to handle those kinds of amounts. (‘Why you want change so much dong?’; ‘We don’t have that much dollar’.) It’s all enough to make an English teacher’s brain curl up and die, whimpering.

Vietnamese ATMs generally only impose a transaction limit and not a daily limit – so with only 36 hours to get the money I hightailed it up to the two convenience stores on Bui Vien when I got back to Backpackerville that night, and duly stood there putting card in, taking money out, putting card back in and taking more money out. Unfortunately, someone forgot to mention this helpful little service to Santander who declined my request when I went back to repeat the operation on Wednesday morning. With only 24 hours and several million dong still to go, and the agent emailing me a copy of the draft contract (no mention of cooling off period) panic was added to doubt and tiredness. By the time I left work on Wednesday night I was tired to the point of tears, although they didn't actually come until Friday night.

Luckily, cash-flow had been restored by the timely appearance of the HR Co-ordinator bearing bank cards stacked with our relocation allowances. And Santander had merely imposed their own daily limit so come Thursday morning I was back in business. So much so that I actually ended up with too many dollars, and at some point I’ll have to go back and change them back into dong.